by Alan Gold
“A seal!” shouted one.
“From the First Temple,” said the other.
Furious at being upstaged, Shalman yelled in fury, “Miriam, why did the Almighty give you such a big mouth?”
* * *
IT WAS ALWAYS DANGEROUS, but Yael’s life was so pressured that the moment she felt the vibration, she picked up her phone, one eye on the frenetic traffic ahead of her, the other eye on the illuminated screen, and quickly read the words of the text message.
It was a request that she return to the hospital as quickly as possible. That meant one of three things, or maybe all three at the same time: one, an urgent new case, somebody who needed surgery immediately; two, one of her patients was in postoperative trouble; or three, the chief surgeon was being pressured by the hospital administration to achieve some sort of new efficiency and he needed Yael’s help to frame a response telling them to go to hell but without upsetting them too much.
She was on her way back from the Israel Museum anyway; she always returned, even for half an hour, to check personally on the recovery of all her patients before quitting for the night. Pulling into the parking lot, she wondered which of the three usual summonses it would be this time—or maybe there’d be a fourth that the bureaucrats had suddenly invented to ensure that the doctors knew who was running the hospital and who was paying the salaries. It was all so infantile, and so typical of Israeli bureaucracy—another reason why Yael had declined the past two promotions she’d been offered from the hospital, preferring instead to do what she loved most and not accepting more money for a new level of administrative responsibility.
Walking quickly toward her boss’s office, she nodded to the secretary and went straight in.
“So, what’s up?”
Pinkus Harber was only ten years older than Yael but looked as if he could be her grandfather. Like Yael, he had no life outside of the hospital. Twice divorced, with four kids who lived elsewhere, he was the archetypal obsessive personality who’d driven himself into the ground. She adored him, as he adored her, and once, in a reception at the hospital, he’d tried to get too friendly and she’d deflected any hope he may once have harbored about a relationship. But it hadn’t affected their professional or personal bond, and they remained both valued colleagues and dear friends.
“Your last patient, the Palestinian kid . . .”
Yael waited for the bad news.
“We have to go in again. He was doing fine in recovery, but then an hour after we took him back into the ward, his BP suddenly dropped massively and we had to pump him full of adrenaline. We nearly lost him. One of his major arteries must have bled.”
Yael frowned and recalled every moment of the four hours she’d spent repairing his body. She shook her head in surprise. “No, not possible. There were no major arteries. He was incredibly lucky. The bullets missed all the biggies and only minor ones were lacerated. I fixed them up. I checked his BP after the closure, and it was fine and rising. It’s something else—gotta be.”
Pinkus shrugged. “What?”
“Dunno, but it couldn’t be from surgery. I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t go into his body cavity or his chest or anything like that. I don’t think we should reopen him—not yet. Let’s just observe him for the next twenty-four hours and keep him on meds and support and see what happens. I suppose you’ve ordered close observations,” she said. “Have we got a reading on his iron yet?”
“Very low. Probably thalassemia. He’s got a huge hemoglobin count and a low red cell count, so I’ve ordered a profile.”
“Do you think it could be something else?” she asked.
“He wouldn’t have gone into shock after the operation because of his thalassemia. Half of the Arabs suffer from it. No, it’s something else. But I agree that we can afford observations for twenty-four hours rather than schlep him back into surgery. Oh, and there’s one more thing . . .”
The look on his face told her that it wasn’t good news. She waited for him to speak again.
“His blood group . . . AB negative . . . very rare, of course. We have a supply shortage. Donations are almost impossible. I know that we can use a negative, but . . . what I mean is . . .”
Yael shook her head, knowing exactly where this was going. AB negative blood types accounted for only one percent of the Israeli population. She herself was one of the very, very few in the country, which was why she was always called upon, every four months, to donate some of her blood.
“No way. No damn way. I sweated blood for him for four hours. I’m not giving him any more, especially my actual blood. Anyway, fill him up with universal O neg. He’ll be fine.”
“Not sure if I want to risk it if he’s suffering from thalassemia. He’s been through trauma, and I’m concerned about an adverse reaction. Better for him to have AB negative. And that’s where we have a problem, because of supply shortages.”
“Isn’t there . . .”
Pinkus shook his head slowly.
“Anywhere?” she asked.
Again he shook his head. “We’ve phoned Tel Aviv, Haifa, everywhere. It’s in such short supply.”
Yael sighed. “My damn mazel. That’s all I need. An Arab with my blood group.”
Pinkus grinned. “Israel is the land of coincidence.”
By the time she returned to the intensive care unit, Bilal was stabilized, but she knew just by looking at him that the pallor of his skin and the deflated nature of his body meant that he was on life support. Again she searched her mind for something she’d missed when she was operating inside his body. But after she’d repaired the damage to his blood vessels and his muscles, and pumped him full of a cocktail of intravenous antibiotics, he should already have started to recover. Nor did it seem to be a severe adverse reaction to the medicines she’d prescribed. A young man in full strength shouldn’t be behaving like an old man grasping at staying alive.
She checked his charts and was worried by his vital signs. But she had no idea what it could be. Still, now that he was stabilized, even though on virtual life support, she had the time to check other things. He could have had a problem with his liver, his kidneys, his gut; something outside of her operation must have happened to have caused such a massive blood pressure drop. If he was suffering from thalassemia, then he’d be anemic, but after the operation his blood pressure had been normal.
The cause usually had to do with loss of blood, but from where? Could one of his organs have been ruptured? Impossible. Could she have missed something? Possible but hugely unlikely—not because she was infallible, but because she’d checked really carefully. And there were no puncture wounds on any other part of his body that could have damaged internal organs.
Perhaps he’d swallowed something and was being poisoned; but again, they’d done a toxicology screen and his blood seemed to be clean. In confusion and concern, she walked to the nurses’ station, smiled at the nurse in charge, and picked up the phone, asking the operator to put her in touch with the head of internal medicine.
She explained in a few terse sentences her patient’s condition to Professor Elon Talmidge, who asked her, “Have you done a CT scan? An MRI? X-rayed his chest and stomach? We might need to do some nuclear medicine to find out what’s happening inside and see if there’s a problem with his organs or some blockage or something. But isn’t this guy the terrorist who killed the guard?”
Yael told him who the patient was.
“I’m talking about a lot of investigation. Seriously high-end medicine. This kid will be going to prison for the rest of his life. It seems a bit of an extravagance, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“And how will that sort of statement sound on Arab television, Elon?” she asked.
“I don’t give a fuck. But you’re right: we should find out why his BP dropped so drastically. Pump him full of blood and I’ll order the tests.”
“That’s another problem,” she told Elon. “We’ve run short of AB negative and I’m probably his only sou
rce.”
He remained silent. It was the silence of condemnation. She could feel him looking sternly at her, even through the phone, just as he’d done when she was at the university and he was her professor.
“Okay, I’ll set it up. You order the X-ray and other tests and I’ll order the bloodwork, and then we’ll find out what’s what,” she said.
She put down the phone and began to write instructions to the pathology department. But when she thought about their having the same blood group, out of interest she wondered what a comprehensive DNA profile would show. His DNA spectrum could explain much about his family history, even going back aeons.
It took twenty-four hours before she began to feel stronger after giving her blood. She barely considered the irony that the kid would survive to live for the rest of his life in a prison. She picked up the reports and wondered whether she would have enough energy to go out tonight to a new stand-up comedy club that she’d been told was very edgy. She yawned and decided to go home, order some takeout.
When she read his results and looked at the pictures from the CT scan, it all became as obvious to her as it had been to her colleagues. The young man was both incredibly unlucky and extraordinarily fortunate. Unlucky that there was a massive growth of rogue blood vessels on the outside of his left kidney, an angiomyolipoma, which had burst and bled at least two liters of blood into his stomach. Yet unbelievably lucky that it had happened in one of the world’s leading hospitals. Had it happened in his village, and had he been taken to a Palestinian hospital, there would have been no hope of it being diagnosed, let alone treated. He might have lived, or he might have died, but he would have been extremely sick.
Because Yael was weakened from giving him blood, the head of surgery had refused to allow her to observe the rare and complex operation. So one of the hospital’s senior renal surgeons had been called upon to insert a catheter in the kid’s leg and follow its progress up his arteries until he’d maneuvered it into the blood vessels that were the source of the growth. There he filled the vessels full of a mixture of ethanol and inert particles, nonreactive gloop designed to block the blood vessels and kill them off. In time the growth would wither and die and normality would be restored. In the meantime, he’d had a large infusion of Yael’s blood, the operative procedure had been successful, his bodily functions had returned to normal, and he’d soon be sufficiently recovered to return to the police, then the courts, then prison.
Yael put down the scans and picked up the pathologist’s report on his blood and DNA. She looked closely at the pictures of the DNA sequences. She studied the vertical lines and read the report. Then she looked again at the sequencing pictures and frowned in concern. She stood and walked over to her filing cabinet, pulling open a drawer and searching for a file. Some years earlier she’d participated in a heritage study among Ashkenazi Jews conducted by the Technion, the university in Haifa. She found the file and withdrew her own DNA sequencing. She looked at it carefully and realized that, despite the air-conditioning, she was sweating profusely.
* * *
942 BCE
FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT on the flat roof of his palace, Solomon watched the two men walking down the steep hill on which the city of Jerusalem had been built. Most of the original buildings of the Jebusites had been demolished. New houses, shops, markets, and palaces had been constructed. And it was a beautiful city, pleasing to Solomon. He smiled as his mind settled on his lesser wife, Naamah. The previous night she had caused him to shout out in joy, doing things to his body that he was certain the Lord Yahweh would find offensive. Yet the words she had whispered to him as he lay spent on the bed, about how the priests weakened him in the eyes of the people, haunted him.
His first wife, Tashere, would be waiting for him tonight. She always waited. But he would not go to her. Naamah was in his thoughts, residing somewhere between lust and desire. Descending two levels in his palace, he walked along a corridor and through a courtyard covered in vines, and entered Naamah’s separate apartments. Though he’d not told anybody he was visiting his third and lesser wife, it was as though her servants were expecting him. Solomon was met at the vestibule of her apartments by two rows of bare-breasted women, some from her nation of Ammon, some from Nubia, and some he thought might be Egyptians. They bowed as he walked past them and held out trays of bread cooked in spices, honey from the comb, and thinly sliced meats. He took a slice of fig covered in honey as he walked toward Naamah’s rooms.
He found her naked except for a sheath of the sheerest gossamer covering her body, lying on her bed propped up on one arm, and smiling at him.
“I knew you’d come to me tonight, my king, my lion,” she said. “I know what mood you wear after you have spoken to those priests of yours. You desire to have your mind and body eased by your loving wife from Ammon.”
Solomon straightened to his full height and looked at her with skepticism in his heart. “And what if I’d have chosen my first wife tonight? What if it had been Tashere the Egyptian I went to?”
“Then you would have enjoyed a long and restful night’s sleep.”
Solomon snorted and stepped closer to the bed. He felt a stirring in his groin.
“Come to me, my lion of Judah. Let your Naamah soothe your mind and excite your body.”
Solomon, lord and master of Israel and many lands and nations beyond, was helpless in her presence. Any resolve he might have had with other wives, no matter how skillfully they pleasured him, disappeared immediately when he was with Naamah. She wasn’t the most beautiful, nor was her body as comely as many of his other wives, nor was she as young and nubile, but she knew how to pleasure him, drawing him to her like bees to a ripe and newly opened flower.
He slipped off his cape, undid the fastenings on his tunic, and in the blinking of an eye stood there naked, prone, and rigid. Naamah smiled and beckoned him with her finger to come to her. Solomon mounted her bed and reached for her breast, cupping it in his hand as he kissed her tenderly. What he didn’t see was Naamah beckoning with her fingers behind his back to three of her most beautiful naked slaves standing just beyond the doorway. They entered her bedchamber, climbed onto her bed, and pleasured Solomon while he was still kissing Naamah.
It took longer, much longer than the previous night, for her lion to be spent, emptied, and satisfied, but as with all men the end came loudly and definitively. As he lay back on her cushions, she dismissed the three slaves and lay beside him, holding him in her arms.
“Why do you let these priests offend you, my king?” she whispered. “In Ammon, my father would have had them nailed to a cross like the Assyrians and the Akkadians when they wish to punish somebody. It can take a man a day or more to die in agony. If you did that to one of your priests, the others would do your bidding immediately.”
His voice hoarse from his cries during lovemaking, he said softly, “I can’t go against them. In your land you have many gods, and your father, the king, is the greatest of your gods. But we are not like you. We have just one god, Yahweh. And anyway, Yahweh tells us that we mustn’t be cruel in our punishments.”
“My lion, I have just felt the potency of your sword. You have great power. It should be you that wields it, not the priests,” she said.
“If I move against the priests, then the people of Israel will spurn me.”
“Then appoint a priest who will wield Yahweh’s sword for you and not for himself. Then both the priests and the people will be your subjects.”
But she didn’t know whether he’d heard, because as she stroked his hair she realized that he was asleep.
* * *
TASHERE, DAUGHTER of Pharaoh Shoshenq and first wife to King Solomon the Wise, had for many years been a devoted wife. But the sands were shifting, and as she made her way to the throne room she eyed with suspicion the people she passed.
Tashere had been the first wife Solomon had taken. When Tashere was Solomon’s only wife, she was lavished with gifts and a palace and attention. Now
Solomon had hundreds of wives. Each day it seemed she saw a woman whose face she had never seen before. Of course they all knew her and greeted her courteously as first wife, but each diminished her a little and she felt their presence like needles in her skin. Yet, Tashere loved Solomon. And at night when she was alone, she reminded herself that she was his first true love and that, regardless of the numbers of other wives and concubines, none of them could feel this way.
Tashere stopped herself at the great doors to the throne room and waited until the king was walking along the corridor. He saw her, opened his arms and embraced her, but she knew from long experience that his embrace lacked the warmth it once did.
“Was Naamah pleasing to you last night, my king and husband?”
“Yes,” he replied flatly.
“It saddens me that you no longer allow me to pleasure you, Solomon.”
He stood back and pulled away, looking closely at her. “Shall I come to you tonight?”
She shook her head. “Tonight is not a night for us. The moon god, Khonshu, has traveled again from Egypt to Israel to visit my body and my blood flows. And besides . . .”
“What?” he asked with a thinly disguised note of annoyance.
Tashere hesitated. “Nothing.” She looked at him and smiled.
The king seemed to soften as if remembering her as she once had been. “I know that I have a place in your heart. That is all I need,” he said.
The compliment stung Tashere like a whip and she drew away from him.
“Not everything is pleasure, my king. You spend so much time looking up to the mountain that you may not see what is at your feet.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I have no power but what you have given me. No wealth but what you allow me. My dowry has already been spent on the timber and the stone of this palace. All I have is your firstborn son, Abia, your heir. And my task is to protect him, to protect your legacy.”
