The Hadassah Covenant

by Tommy Tenney

  “But then you believe my father saw you as a threat.”

  “Of a sort. It was only natural—he had been her protector for so long now. They had learned the year before that their parents had died, so he acted in every way as her father.”

  “Yes, and now here you were, cutting a dashing figure, as you said. . . . ”

  “And I did what any dashing young man would do. I asked her, in my best calm voice, if I might take her to dinner. She glanced over at her brother—your father—ever so quickly, in a way that told me his assent would be required. And he fixed me with this piercing look and said in a flat voice I will never forget, ‘How about you meet us for Shabbat tomorrow. What shul do you attend?’ I looked at him and asked, ‘Shul?’ Because you see, I was not raised in the faith.”

  “You are not Jewish?” she exclaimed.

  Al-Khalid shrugged, raising his eyebrows. There’s the question . . . . “Your father then shook his head in disgust and used the word he thought a lesser Jew might recognize. ‘Synagogue. You’ve heard of a synagogue?’ And I nodded my head yes, although I had never set foot in one of those, either.”

  “I’m sorry. I-I’m becoming very confused,” she stammered.

  He held up his hand with a look that said, One more minute, please, and you’ll understand.

  “And then I heard the voice I hated most in the world. The anglicized, un-Jewish, high-British voice of the same attache who’d been making my life miserable the whole week prior. He marched up and interrupted me with these words I will never forget: ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Kesselman. But as we both know, Shabbat services are only for Jews.’ At that moment a look of such disdain filled your father David’s eyes that I had to look away. I’m sure it wasn’t that he hated all Gentiles. He simply thought I had been trying to deceive him and his sister.”

  “Why would an embassy official presume to insert himself like that? Into a private conversation that was none of his business?”

  “Because he considered it every bit his business. You see, I was under an Esther Edict. And he was the one who had placed it on me.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  An Esther Edict? I’ve never heard of such a thing!” Hadassah exclaimed.

  “They were quite common in those days. An absolute order not to divulge that one is Jewish. Its name is taken from Mordecai’s admonition to Esther to hide her true identity.”

  “So you actually were Jewish? And the Israeli government asked you to do this? Why would they require that?”

  Al-Khalid nodded sadly. “Another long story. For your purposes, it starts nine years before, when I arrived on a passenger ship from Kuwait. I grew up in Iraq—Baghdad, actually, where my family was one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential business dynasties. My father once owned the largest, most successful textile plant in the Middle East, employing several thousand people. He advised the Iraqi prime minister. Supplied uniforms to the Iraqi Army. Sold most of the black silk used by Iraqi women in making Abayahs, the body-length veil worn by the most conservative Muslims. Women were not forced to wear them in those days, although many chose to do so. But life was good. Jews were known as dhimmis back then, a protected minority with guaranteed freedom of worship. Half the seats on Baghdad’s municipal council were held by Jews. The M’halat-el ’Yhud, the Jewish quarter, occupied nearly a fourth of all Baghdad, and one hundred thirty-seven thousand people lived in it. But that all ended one summer night in 1941.”

  “The infamous Shavuot massacre.”

  He nodded with a faint smile. “You’ve been well taught, Madam. A pro-Nazi dictator seized power just days before, and, fascist sycophant that he was, wasted no time trying to carry out his own version of the Third Reich. A huge government-sanctioned crowd swept into the Jewish district, bent on mayhem. Nine hundred Jews were killed during the next twelve hours in a particularly vicious farhod—Iraqi slang for what their European counterparts would have called a pogrom. I lost three cousins, an uncle, and my best friend that night. They were buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of town, unidentified.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen. Even though the British army soon swooped in and reversed the coup, things only grew worse for the Jews from then on. Nearly every morning, another rabbi or patriarch would be found hanging in a Baghdad square. It was open season on Jewish girls outside at night. Robbery and open looting of Jewish businesses became almost expected. The papers brazenly called for our extermination.”

  “And their readers obeyed, apparently.”

  “They tried their hardest. So my father engineered an intricate business maneuver. He made a big pretense of selling all his holdings to his Iraqi foreman for a relatively modest sum. He held a press conference, took out ads throughout the country. Our family was leaving Iraq, they said. El-Khalid Textile would now be a Muslim-owned enterprise.”

  He stopped and turned, for even through the embassy’s thick walls they had both heard the sound of police sirens approaching. The wail crested, and with a flashing of bright lights against their ancient window, it turned away and began to diminish.

  He shrugged, closed his eyes, and continued.

  “Behind the scenes, however, my father had crafted an agreement whereby he would continue to receive half of all net profits for as long as he lived. We would enjoy a comfortable exile, living off of our dividend checks and working for the Zionist cause. And should my father ever return, which we anticipated would happen within a few years, his share would be returned for a simple refund of the purchase price.”

  “Did the plan work?

  Al-Khalid shook his head and sighed heavily. “For about two days. But my father’s plan depended on one flimsy intangible, and that was the trust he was placing in his Sunni Muslim partner of over twenty years, a man whom he had plucked from direst poverty. His trust was sorely misplaced. This partner turned out to be a cunning animal with a keen eye on the political landscape. He betrayed my father’s plan to the authorities and lodged a false charge of sedition to seal our doom. My whole family was arrested just before Haditha, right outside the Syrian border.”

  The old man closed his eyes and sank his head back onto the headrest of his Edwardian leather chaise. Hadassah could almost feel the past sweeping over him in waves, filling the room.

  “I will never forget it,” he continued, suddenly out of breath. “It was noon, and we were dead center in Iraq’s Western Desert. As soon as we heard the police lorry’s doors close behind us, my father turned to me in our lead car and whispered, ‘Run. Run as fast as you can, my son,’ he said in a voice so filled with emotion he sounded like he was trying to sing me a lullaby. I felt him press something hard into my hands, looked down, and saw the gold-filled lap belt he had worn under his robes.”

  With his eyes tilted up and wistful, and a voice that betrayed the number of times he had repeated these phrases by memory, al-Khalid quoted verbatim his father’s last words.

  “He said, ‘Take this and find the Mizrahi Synagogue in London. Beg them to name an Exilarch. And to remember their brothers. Go!’”

  Al-Khalid’s reverie was interrupted by the loud throb of a helicopter flying low overhead and very fast. And then another just behind it. Al-Khalid scowled, shook his head in curiosity, and continued.

  “I wrapped the belt around my arm and fell out into the blinding sunlight. I could scarcely see where I was going, so fierce was the sun, and so bitterly was I weeping. The sensation of my beloved dada’s fingers digging into the flesh of my arm, shoving me with all his strength out into a world that wanted me dead . . . I can still feel it.” He paused and looked away for a moment. “I scrambled to my feet and began to sprint. I remember the sound of my sobs following me through the dunes over the pop-pop of the police carbines and the fizz of bullets striking the sand around my ankles. But I was young, fast, and in fear of my life, and I ran like a rabbit on fire. I was so quick that I never saw my father again. Not even a look back.”

  Ha
dassah couldn’t tell if the remorse in his voice stemmed from escaping without that final glimpse, or from escaping at all. “And so you came here.”

  “Over time, yes. I came here just as Operations Ezra and Nehemiah were in their planning stages. By then, most of my family members were imprisoned in Mosul, and there were plans under way to break them out.”

  “That explains the Esther Edict,” Hadassah commented.

  “Oh, of course. One word in the wrong circle and they would have all died horribly. And make no mistake; my silence was as important then as my Arab-sounding name had been in years past. It was the best protection I had.”

  “So you never mentioned it to anyone?”

  “No one. The plans to free them were so sensitive and London so full of anti-Semitic spies that the embassy operatives refused to work with me unless I swore it. When the attache cornered me, I had no choice. I had to lie about my identity or all efforts to save my family would have been suspended immediately. And that was more important to me than anything else in the world. Even more important than love.”

  Al-Khalid now seemed more like a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch, speaking toward the ceiling, with his body more and more relaxed in the chair.

  The spell was broken with more alarming noises from the hallway—shoes scuffling furiously, anxious voices, even a growl of warning. Sounds defiantly out of place within a well-protected embassy. Alarming sounds . . .

  Hadassah jumped from her chair, her whole body rigid with concern. Al-Khalid struggled to rise. At once three men seemed to tumble from the hallway into the room, their faces red and their breaths panting audibly.

  “Madam ben Yuda,” said the nearest one, her lead Mossad bodyguard, “there’s been . . . there’s been a situation. Your husband has asked that we come for you.”

  She stifled a sound of panic from her throat. “Is he all right? Has there been an attack?”

  The bodyguard shook his head no, swallowing to catch his breath. “No, ma’am. Nothing like that. But we’ve been ordered to bring you both with us to . . . view something.”

  A shout came from the hallway. A man’s voice, strained and angry, echoed down to them. “I’m with him! I’m not here with you!”

  And then it seemed as though the hallway launched the man into their midst, still glancing angrily behind him at the person to whom he had yelled.

  Then he must have realized where he was, and he turned around.

  Hadassah couldn’t help her quick intake of breath.

  He was not wearing the horn-rimmed glasses, or the nondescript black clothing he had worn at the Shrine of the Book. His full beard was gone.

  But he was alive.

  Their gazes met and his eyes dropped toward the floor.

  Against all her instincts, she spoke. “He—this is a member of Mossad. I know him—” she began, pointing at him but speaking to the other men gathered around the room’s entrance and glaring at the man.

  “We know that, ma’am,” said her lead bodyguard. “But he isn’t with us.”

  “He’s with me,” said a voice from beside her. She turned in amazement to al-Khalid, whose mouth was still stretched wide, still forming that last amazing word.

  “He’s my son.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  At that point, Hadassah’s grasp on the situation collapsed. She had a sense of wrinkling her forehead in bewilderment, stammering some opening syllables of an inane question, and being led out docilely by the arm, like someone struck over the head and slightly dazed.

  Fortunately, the old man’s disclosure seemed to dispel further hostile tension, and without further debate they were all now up and out, walking as fast as their numbers would allow down the narrow hallway. There was a turn, and a second, and a third, and soon she had lost all track of where they were. The group seemed to have burrowed much deeper into the building complex than its outer dimensions would have allowed.

  At last they came to a dead end and a metallic panel, which in some urban high-tech loft might have indicated the door of a recessed stainless-steel refrigerator. Its outer panel slid open silently at their approach, revealing an elevator compartment as gleaming and solid as the inside of a safe.

  Somehow they all crowded inside, and Hadassah must have been expecting an upward climb, for she felt distinctly jarred when they dropped swiftly downward. She turned and found herself nose to chin with Meyer—the awkward self-consciousness of a shared elevator aggravated by the amazement, and tinge of unreasonable anger, she felt at meeting him there.

  “So, Agent Meyer. We seem to meet in all sorts of dire situations,” she murmured, refusing to match the flippancy of her question with a forgiving look. “You disappeared right after our last meeting. And then I was told you were dead. I grieved, you know. Strange, because we’d known each other all of fifteen minutes. But they were, you know . . . rather intense.”

  “It was not of my choosing,” he said in a low, sincere voice she had not previously heard from him. “And I was not in a position to reveal my having survived.”

  His reply did not seem to bear answering, which was good because they had reached bottom, and the doors hummed open.

  They walked into a vast, coolly lit control room. Hadassah recognized it at once—more from eighties-vintage American military thrillers than from any personal experience.

  The room’s ambient light glowed from walls hung with oversized map-laden LCD screens and rows of glowing laptops stared at by men in uniforms of the Israeli Defense Force, the IDF. She knew the American President had a similar installation below the White House, and that it was called, at least colloquially, the Situation Room. Surely this one had some sort of similar name, but given her attempts at composure, she knew she would not risk asking the room’s name.

  An officer appeared from the shadows while she was glancing around. “Mrs. ben Yuda, I apologize for the interruption. And I do not wish to alarm you, but as you may have been told, the Prime Minister asked personally for you and your guest”—he paused, angling his head toward al-Khalid with a deliberate nod—“to receive personal briefings. We think you’ll realize why momentarily. Unfortunately, I must warn you that what you’re about to see is quite disturbing. Feel free to look away at any point, of course. You’re not likely to misunderstand.”

  He turned and walked them over to the largest of the room’s screens, all of which were cued up to the same Iraqi broadcast at once—twenty simultaneous faces of a winsome young teenaged girl in a horrific situation.

  In normal circumstances one might only have noticed that she was a strikingly beautiful young girl. In particular, she possessed a set of piercing green eyes that seemed to shine with a radiant inner glow.

  But now those eyes were nearly impossible to meet straight-on, for they blazed with a terror that few of even the room’s most hardened warriors had ever seen before.

  First of all, what appeared to be an oversized kitchen knife was held snugly against her throat.

  Secondly, the rest of her face was twisted in a horrific expression which no young girl should ever have to wear, and no human being should ever have to watch. Hadassah learned in a moment that genuine terror is unforgettable enough, but the look of someone expecting to be horribly murdered within the following seconds is infinitely worse.

  Thirdly, the tortured words tumbling from her lips froze Hadassah’s blood within her veins.

  “Please. My name is Ariana al-Feliz. I am Iraqi. And . . . and I am also Jewish. My whole family is about to die if you do not help me!” Her voice broke, and the pain and terror said as much as her words. “We have been apprehended by the Death to the Exilarch Committee, and we . . . we are about to become . . .” She looked up to listen to a voice from above her and repeated, “. . . sacrificial lambs of the modern Shi’ite fatwa.” She stumbled over the last words.

  Her image multiplied across the wall, she cried out and squinted. Hadassah was horrified to see the knife had pressed further into her tender neck.
Blood oozed onto the blade and down to her clavicle.

  “Their demands are these,” the girl panted out the words. “The Jihad insists that all Zionist claims against the rightful property of the Iraqi people be . . . be ceased immediately and withdrawn from the international courts. Please, sir . . . my four-year-old sister is about to be slaughtered next if you do not show mercy. Please, Mr. al-Khalid? I beg you—”

  The last was strangled, and the girl’s voice drowned in a gurgling, liquid sound. Hadassah looked away just as the room began to rotate. Her eyes rolled upward into her head as four male arms appeared from either side and held her fast. From somewhere offscreen came the sound of wild, hysterical screaming. A gray pall descended over her vision. Her stomach heaved and her throat, all on its own, launched into the initial throes of retching. She clasped a hand to her mouth.

  A frenzy of motion beside her caught her attention, and an adrenaline charge shocked her nausea under control as she turned just in time to see the old man fall backward. The glow of a single monitor illuminated a glimpse of his face—cheek and forehead muscles gripped by waves of merciless contractions.

  In a single sweep of her head, she saw that Ari Meyer had not seen his father’s collapse, but stood pointing at the screen, his finger shaking.