by Tommy Tenney
That, my dear confidante Esther, is exactly how I feel.
I desperately need to know if you have ever felt the same. And if so, how you have managed to endure it. My only hope to retain the last shred of my sanity is that you indeed have endured some of this pain and have some secret that will help me survive.
Would to G-d I had never let my fantasies deceive me that night!
I await your reply, my cherished friend, with every breath left in me.
Leah
Osborn started his vehicle quickly and sped into the Baghdad night—not due to any appointment or deadline, but his knowledge that merely sitting alone in a vehicle for so long could turn him into a target of random terrorism. Not to mention the explosive information the ratty little truck now harbored.
His mind sped just as quickly over the passage he had just translated. Even the abbreviated symbols referring to “G-d” confirmed the authenticity of the document. His heart pounded with jubilation—and fear.
Chapter Six
THE JERUSALEM CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS—THREE DAYS LATER
In the minutes before it happened, Jerusalem had seemed to be in a celebratory mood, as hope for a long-awaited peace settlement hovered in the air. The night-shrouded capital fairly throbbed with the prospect of a just-negotiated land-for-security agreement between its leader and the new Palestinian prime minister—unaware that a few hundred kilometers away, unfolding events would hurl fresh challenges at the long-harbored dream.
In Jerusalem’s cultural district, triumphant Prime Minister Jacob ben Yuda was oblivious to the threat—even in the mood for a night out. His bride of several years, the one-time Hadassah Kesselman, had even chosen the occasion to invite her dearly loved Poppa to share it with them.
After that evening, Israel’s First Lady would remember only a few of the evening’s preliminaries. What she would somehow remember best and most vividly was the moment the dogs began to bark.
She would recall an odd collection of other jumbled moments leading up to the barking. She would recollect key lines of dialogue from the premiere performance of the play she, her husband, and her father had just attended—a taut thriller about a deeply conflicted housewife and her homicidal lover. She would recall the words her father had just muttered in her ear about the lead actor’s mediocre performance. And the sly grin of agreement she had flashed him, just out of reporters’ sight—grateful that Poppa had, for once, remembered to keep his voice down. She could feel again her hunger, not having eaten since a meager breakfast that morning. And, complacently accustomed to standing just one crosshair away from the Prime Minister’s spotlight, she would recall precisely where her husband had stood—or to whom he had been waving—at the critical moment.
Yet the memory that somehow stuck in her mind was the instant the bomb-sniffing dogs flew into full alarm.
She would forever recall the suddenness and savagery of the noise. How viciously the growls engulfed the marble lobby and drowned out the glitterati’s murmur, the reporters’ shouts. She would remember its odd quality—more fierce and rapid than any barking she had ever heard from any large dog, and at such an anguished, unnaturally high pitch. As though the German shepherds were being choked by the brightly colored climbing-rope leashes along which her husband’s bodyguards held them fast.
She would remember turning away from her father and frowning toward the chaos, seeing the animals lunge across the crowded vestibule in exaggerated frenzy. She had recoiled at the sight of the dogs at full alarm, their bodies straining so hard against their straps that their heads stood as high as their handlers’. And the sight of fangs snapping in the light of the chandeliers, saliva slinging away from open jaws onto nearby ball gowns.
All this from animals usually so gentle she had gone months without even noting their presence.
Somehow she would remember these details far more clearly than the attacker’s face. Of that, she would only recall the slightest details, yet those details were enough. A split second of fear pouring from dark eyes. Neck tendons strained and flexing. A lean visage twisted with hate so powerful that as brief as it was, the sight sent a shiver freezing down her whole body.
Then the bellow of a Galil sniper rifle, fired at short range.
And the running man jerking back, recoiling against the blow.
Then seeing him recover. Regain his footing. Refocus that vicious expression onto them—onto her? Oddly thinking, It’s only because I’m standing next to my husband. The Prime Minister. Hearing shouts reach her ears, or perhaps her awareness, about a vest. The man was wearing a bulletproof vest!
Then came another strange sound—the clatter of several thousand dress shoes and high heels racing in unison across polished marble. Out of the corner of an eye she saw the scuffed bottoms of her husband’s loafers and realized he was being dragged away to safety as well.
Without her.
More shots rang out. The room filled with echoes of ratcheted thunder—she recognized machine-gun fire. This time the man running toward them was knocked off his feet. The noise stopped and she glimpsed him being buried under the hurtling bodies of more bodyguards.
Someone pushed her back, and she realized that her father was shoving her down with all the strength left in an old man’s limbs. Her own high heels slipped and she felt herself fall to the floor. Land hard. A dark shape filled her vision—her father . . . on top of her. And as feeble as he was, she knew he had not tripped out of weakness or instability.
Poppa had thrown himself. Two other large, dark shapes leaped on top of him, crushing her. Bodyguards.
A male voice screamed—
And a new explosion shredded her world apart!
Its shock wave slammed into her body.
White light seared her retinas.
Roaring flooded her ears.
Flame scorched her exposed skin.
Her body and those of the men on top of her, joined for a moment by gravity, jerked apart with unimaginable savagery. She saw an arm fly away, and a hand, in a strange slow motion. She curled like a child against the burning and clutched her abdomen. Her ears felt attacked by an awful something, a rumble that was more vibration than sound.
A strange person unleashed a long, anguished cry. Eerily, she recognized her own disembodied voice.
Then the blast was spent, replaced by a mist of dust upon her face. And darkness—a lack of light through her closed eyelids. The chandeliers had blown out. For an awful second, she heard nothing but a distant ringing sound. Then came a whimper, and she again realized that it had come from her mouth. And that she was sobbing.
Her eyelashes were clotted shut, so she spent a moment wiping them clean. Dreading what she would see, she opened her eyes. She glanced at her hands—they gleamed red with blood. Silhouetted by spotlights outside the lobby’s clear glass walls, she could see her husband teeter to his feet and, with an authority more characteristic of a husband than a prime minister, yank himself away from the grasps of two bodyguards. He stumbled to her side and dropped to his knees.
“Honey, are you . . . are you all right?” As she read his lips, her ears still ringing from the thunder of the explosion, an eerie quiet reigned over her world.
“Yes . . . yes,” she heard herself answer in a voice higher and more breathy than her own. “But Poppa?”
Her husband did not answer, only tightened his grip around her shoulders. She pushed against him. The hold grew tighter still. She rebelled.
“Poppa!” She felt panic rise up, fierce enough to bury her alive. Then she felt defiant again. She would see him. “Poppa!”
She tore herself from her husband and fell away to one side. Her eyes took in the horrible sight of three lumps lying motionless in a thick layer of debris. Then two onlookers moved aside and unknowingly let another shaft of outside light shine upon the floor.
And she saw.
The two bodyguards who had flung themselves upon her lay motionless, steeped in crimson. Poppa was lying on h
is back, his chest and the floor around him covered with shards of glass from the shattered windows and chandelier. She could not see the state of his torso very clearly, other than a faintly wet gleam. And the strange absence of a limb at his left shoulder socket.
Her lungs heaved themselves into runaway train mode. She could not catch her breath. She threw herself at what remained of . . .
. . . everything. The man who had crafted her entire person. Who had changed her diapers. Who had taught her to read. Who had made her who she was. The influence that had shaped every day of her childhood. The imposing figure who had first taught her that a truly strong man was more than capable of showing tenderness and affection. Who had, beyond that, taught her what a man even was. Who had shaped her entire perspective of the world, then launched her into its uncaring chaos with the confidence of a young woman who knew that no matter what, she was the apple of her Poppa’s eye, and that she mattered immensely to at least one good man, one very good man. . . .
It all streamed through her frantic mind in one awful moment.
Hadassah struggled to regain control of her breathing, then became aware that she was uttering loud, hoarse gasps. The sound of someone in hypoxia—deprived of air.
She bent down into his face, desperate for a familiar look at him. For just one reassuring familiar aspect. She felt a hand tremble up to the back of her neck and realized that it was his right. He was feebly pulling her forward. Closer toward him.
He was gasping as well, only not as loudly. “Hadassah,” he groaned, hardly audible.
“No, no!” She couldn’t be sure whether she was revolting against the situation, against what was happening, or merely pleading with him not to speak. But she kept repeating the word. “No!!”
“Hadassah, I have to tell you—”
“No, Poppa. I love you. I love you, and you have to stay quiet. You have to let them—”
“You too, darling . . . please listen . . .”
The word listen was almost pure breath.
“No! I won’t. You’ll stay still, and they’ll take care of you, and you’ll be fine.”
“I am dying.” Strangely, there was more steel in his voice now. “Listen.”
She said nothing but gritted her teeth and pressed her lips into his bloody cheek. She brought her ears closer.
“She did not perish. You must find her.”
The hand slipped from her neck and struck marble with a small slap. The cheek fell away from her lips.
She slumped backward and screamed into the shredded ceiling until her breath gave out, until more hands surrounded her and she heard her husband’s voice and was lifted to her feet without having to make the effort.
Chapter Seven
THE PRIME MINISTER’S RESIDENCE—REHAVIA, JERUSALEM—TWO WEEKS LATER
He stood before her again—Poppa’s wrinkled, beloved face just two feet away, still caked white with dust, streaked with trails of dried blood, his sparse gray hairs still on end from the explosion. He was leaning gently in the doorway just as she had seen him do when she was a child, on those many long afternoons when he returned from work. But now he wore a sheepish, almost embarrassed, grin. As if to say, Pardon my appearance, dear. I know it’s a bit alarming, but then, as you know—I am dead. . . .
Even in her sleep, she could feel her head jerk back and her heart race, her insides recoil with a complex blend of love, revulsion, self-reproach, and longing. She felt her arms strain forward. Poppa, I don’t mean to shudder. I don’t mean to pull back. It’s just that I’m grieving for you, and now to see you here, looking like this . . .
And then he would speak those words again. The cryptic utterance would leave his mouth with an echo that seemed to physically travel across space to her ears, invading her senses with an unrelenting cadence.
“She did not perish. You must find her.”
In the dream she always looked around her. Perhaps she did so to detect any eavesdroppers, perhaps to give herself a moment for processing once again the strange words’ meaning. But then when she turned back, he was gone. Only the words, with their mysterious challenge, remained.
And yet, as disturbing as was his appearance, she immediately longed for its return. His presence, however illusory, felt like a wisp of warmth in an arctic winter.
Now its departure once more caused an ache inside her and the extinguishing of her last hope.
She cried out piteously and struck her pillows with a groan. But she was losing the fight. The more resolutely Hadassah tried to resist waking, the more the effort itself revived her.
I simply cannot wake up, she told herself. Not to the ordeal of another day. Another fourteen hours of fog, one more dawn-to-dusk living with despair, of groping through a thick, cottony haze, fighting for the strength to carry out any of the things she once loved.
Before it happened. Before life had become a living nightmare. Before the doctors had walked in to tell her that her father had slipped away, and then, less than twenty-four hours later, to be told that one of the three shrapnel bits in her abdomen had pierced her uterus and put in doubt any chance she had ever entertained of becoming a mother.
That final realization caused her to lose the fight against waking, and again her senses converged to a razor point. Whisked to the here-and-now, she found herself lying fetal-style in the soft four-poster bed of the Prime Minister’s master bedroom.
Alone.
On a Sunday morning. The first day of the Jewish week.
Much later in the day than ordinary—respectable—people ever slept.
Yes, she was definitely awake, she noted with a wince, distraught that the sleeping pills had only worked for a few hours. She momentarily contemplated taking a handful more. . . . A permanently pain-free state beckoned just beyond conscious thought. Then, as if to remind herself that her namesake, the ancient Hadassah, would not have retreated so easily, her awareness slipped away from the confines of her half-dormant self to probe her surroundings. Her eyes remained shut, but her ears noted a high, oppressive silence. The kind of late-in-the-day stillness she remembered from better times, when she had merely overslept on a carefree weekend and couldn’t wait to jump out of bed and redeem what was left of the morning. The only sound was a faint nuisance from the ticking bedside alarm clock. A nagging reminder that time is passing. You’re wasting your life . . . .
She gritted her teeth. Her failure to stay asleep now thrust her into a whole new gauntlet of challenges. She reluctantly opened her eyes. There was light, way too much and far too bright. High above her floated the bedroom’s pale white ceiling, distant and ethereal. She groaned again, for her husband had left the bedside lamp on. She knew it was his own subtle challenge to her—Get up. Do something. Overcome this.
It was his only way. He was a good man, but he possessed no other skills with which to address what she was suffering. No words to soothe her pain or to frame his helplessness. Only symbolic gestures.
She rolled over, extended her arm, wincing at the pain of still-healing stitches across her abdomen, and flicked the light off. Under her arm, still open, lay the only book that meant anything to her now: the journals of Queen Esther, recopied from scrolls in the Israel State Museum, the Shrine of the Book. These had been bound and given to her as a wedding gift from her Poppa. This most precious scroll actually belonged to her family but was on permanent loan to the museum for safekeeping. It traced her family’s genealogy back for nearly three thousand years—not to Queen Esther, but to her young friend Leah. It enshrined the memory of her mother, who had added her signature only three days before marrying Hadassah’s father. This treasure left to her by her family was such a cherished heirloom that, for generations, her ancestors had kept it a secret until a young woman’s marriage. She had read them for the umpteenth time throughout the previous day, five minutes at a time as her strength allowed. It was the only sense of connection left to her—a link of words and dimly recollected emotions reaching several millennium into the past. T
hat’s how far back I have to go, she lamented. Thousands of years to find someone who means anything to me now . . . .
She rolled back over into her pillows with a sigh torn from the depths of her being. You have to do it, she whispered into the cotton, gritting her teeth. Force yourself. Get out of bed, make yourself up for the day. Eat something. Read the newspaper. . . .
Especially that, she remembered. She had once loved her morning papers, thrilled to the sense of being connected to the day’s great events, the thrilling bustle of modern existence, the unpredictably of news. In Israel—especially for a modern woman with a master’s degree and a nearly finished doctorate, a learned, opinionated prime minister’s wife—there was always a Big Story—or two, or a half dozen. Complete with vociferous differences of opinion from countless vocal factions. Endless analysis. Commentary ad nauseam. And in Israel, the stakes were always high. Armageddon always seemed just a minor crisis or two away. Once, the very sight of those half dozen newspaper rolls lying against her front doorstep in the dawn’s halflight filled her with a throb of anticipation.
The Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, Globes, Maariv, even the International Edition of The New York Times—once she had devoured them like the avid knowledge-hound she used to be. Now they lay there like an intrusion of horror into her life. Now she was the news, or at least a key element of the Big Story, and it didn’t feel so thrilling. An assassination attempt on the Prime Minister, even an unsuccessful one, offered fodder enough for several months’ worth of media frenzy, so the Israeli press had been handed a rare double handful. Not to mention that the close call had occurred hard on the heels of Jerusalem’s initiating the most serious and promising Palestinian peace talks in half a century—the very real prospect of a lasting solution hanging in the balance. That angle had infused the story with a screaming sense of urgency. The very embryo of peace, headlines shouted, seemingly aborted by a failed attack that should have been anticipated by the Prime Minister’s myriad security forces. Or something to that effect. Never before had suicide bombers been so desperate and gotten so close. And never at a worse time. It was the story of the decade.
