by Tommy Tenney
And then again, there was that word Return, those syllables that detonated volcanic emotions inside him. The Right of Return was one of the things which set Israel apart from all other nations, which confirmed how remarkable in human history the Covenant truly was. It meant, essentially, that any person of Hebrew blood could claim Israeli citizenship upon their return from wherever in the world the Diaspora—the exile sparked upon the destruction of Jerusalem millennia before—had flung them.
He cracked the door open, and with the shock of actual sunlight came a hand, then two, forcing the crack farther apart. The door flew wide and another man in civilian clothes stepped through.
It was the end, finally delivered to his doorstep.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The man faced him a moment, his eyes warm and shining, and extended his hand.
“Rebbe, my name is Ari Meyer, from—well, from the government of Israel. I regret the intrusion.”
“I regret it, too,” said the rabbi.
“Sir,” the man continued without apology, “there’s another farhod under way. You’re likely old enough to remember ’forty-one? I’m sorry to be so blunt, but you’ll be killed. We’re gathering as many of your people as we can and taking them to safety. Will you please come with us? There is no other choice. As I’m sure you know, the Jews of Baghdad, both open and concealed, are being targeted. I imagine you’re aware of the hostage situation with the al-Feliz family.
“Aware of it? Mr. Meyer, only three weeks ago I traveled to Al Hillah to conduct Ariana al-Feliz’s secret Bas Mitzvah. I have known her since the night she was born. And her family for most of my life.”
“I’m very sorry, sir. My colleagues and I are fully aware that your synagogue has been the discreet hub for what remains of Iraqi Jewry. Not to mention that you are the person at the core of it all.”
“Then your apology is accepted. But don’t assume again that just because we’re isolated and endangered, we’re not a community and very aware of each other’s concerns.”
“Agreed. But, Rabbi, there is not much time. I must ask you. Are you ready to make your Return?”
“No, I am not. If I had been inclined to turn tail for Israel, I would have done so decades ago.”
“I understand, Rabbi. But the final hour has arrived. There’s no more time, no refuge left. This is it.”
“Then I would rather stay here and die with my people.”
Ari nodded understandingly and glanced briefly out the door, where sunshine blazed in the courtyard.
“But, Rabbi, what if you could save them?” he asked, looking directly at the rabbi. “What if you could help me find those who remain, those others who are in peril?”
“Do not patronize me, young man. The survival of my people—it is all I live for. What is your name again?”
“Actually, Meyer is only an operational surname. My true last name is al-Khalid.”
“You mean . . . of the Iraq, Baghdad, al-Khalids?”
Ari nodded solemnly.
“I always wondered what happened to your family,” said the rabbi slowly.
“Yes. I was hoping you could shed some light on that for me.”
“My son, so many have disappeared into thin air over the last thirty years. I am afraid your family was among them, although they were certainly one of the most powerful and well known. You are the son of Anek?”
“Yes, Rebbe. And I aspire to something else. Something I hope you can support.”
The rabbi waved dismissively. “I’m afraid I no longer have any authority or approval to confer on anyone.”
“You are the living heart of Iraqi Jewry. And I, G-d willing, would be its new Exilarch.”
The old man stared at him through the shadows, his face slack with amazement.
“Do you carry the bloodline?”
“Yes.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Not quite. The final evidence I was hoping you could help me find. This is one of my objectives. I am also here to protect the remnant and find out what happened to my own.”
The rabbi sighed forcefully, then gave the younger man a fierce look.
“Then I suppose we’d better get on with it.”
Ari held out his hand, and they stepped through the door, free of the Battaween Synagogue, into the harsh glare of noonday.
It all made Rabbi Mehl want to weep, for in many ways, this was the final gasp of a population that had lived in these streets and alleys for over twenty-five hundred years. He himself had witnessed only its most eventful final half century. He had survived the pogroms of the forties and fifties. Stayed behind after the heady days of the Ezra and Nehemiah Airlifts. Outlasted the long madness of Hussein’s regime, with its alternating periods of tolerance, murderous brutality, and eventual indifference. He had seen the wall go up around the synagogue’s perimeter. And then the wire on top of that.
And now, to see it all come to an end with his being escorted away without time for even a backward glance. He was striding across the small plaza as he had not done in years, being rushed through a cordon of soldiers, who shouldered their rifles out toward the surrounding buildings, sighting on the cowering citizens who had themselves made him cower for so very long. For the smallest glint of a second, he felt the bittersweet comeuppance of it all rise like a bitter surge of bile.
And then he was inside the infernal machine, the army helicopter, with a great door slamming and men shouting gruffly and a sudden lifting sensation pressed against his limbs. He looked out the glass and saw the building, whose preservation had consumed his entire life, tilt and shrink into the puzzle grid of greater Baghdad.
“How much fuel does this awful thing carry?” he asked Ari over the roar of the propellers. “There may not be much time, but if you have maps, I can help you find some documents and save some of our brothers and sisters—at one time. . . . ”
Chapter Twenty-eight
OUTSIDE MAYDAN SARAY, DIYALA PROVINCE, IRAQ—NINETY MINUTES LATER
Abadi, the youngest son, saw it first, coming fast and low across the valley below him.
Kicking his soccer ball out on the mountain farm’s only flat patch of ground, he stiffened, distractedly letting the ball strike his shin and bounce away down the slope. This sort of mistake on most days meant an hour-long descent to correct—but Abadi wasn’t concerned. He’d always found the ball before. After all, he was the only boy this side of Maydan Saray, and who else would risk life and limb astride a thousand-foot clifftop for an inflated piece of leather?
At that moment, the eight-year-old didn’t care about the ball, anyway. He was too preoccupied with the object flying toward him along the twenty-five-mile-long Zagros Mountain valley. The high cleft in the range separating eastern Iraq from Iran was his home—where his family eked out a meager living, yet experienced a relatively safe existence, as high-altitude sheep farmers.
It was late afternoon, Abadi’s favorite time to get outside and escape Momma’s constant vigilance. At that hour in early fall, their home site’s merciless winds usually subsided to a cool kiss upon the forehead, while the dwindling sun filled their valley with infinite hues of burnt orange and turquoise and a thousand gradations of alpine detail.
Abadi knew the panorama well enough to realize that the growing speck with the flat glide path was no eagle. He could also tell it was not native to his part of the world.
Despite ever-present drop-offs and assorted mountain perils, living here was far less frightening than his old neighborhood far away in Baghdad. Back then, every single vehicle driving down their tiny street, every car horn’s echo, was grounds for an anxious pause or a sweeping glance out the window. He had grown up in fear of the sniper and the car bomb, learning from his youngest years to slam windows shut and stay indoors.
Living out here in the country wasn’t perfect. There was still need for some vigilance; over in the next valley, local Kurds had once exchanged small-arms fire with Hussein’s Republican Guard, back befor
e the coming of the Americans. Today, the Sunni insurgency still persisted, and they had few friends down in the closest town of Maydan Saray. And now, since the overthrow of Saddam, there were the sonic booms, the high bomber contrails and the Predator drones cruising past on their way to Iran.
But that was nothing. At least that’s what Poppa always said. That is the price of freedom. In Baghdad, Abadi never once played outside the front door. It had never even occurred to him.
So now he called out, in the best alarm voice his older brother had taught him. A wordless cry, simply meant to echo as loudly and as far as possible.
Owwwweeeeeeeeeeweeee!
He had never let one go that loud and bold before—he hoped he didn’t get spanked. But the black shape was growing larger, more quickly than he’d ever seen. Even in his nightmares.
Suddenly an arm encircled his waist and yanked him back into the house. It was Momma, of course, but suddenly Poppa’s face and shoulders filled the doorway, and his older brother, Jalaal’s, behind him. They were panting heavily. The two couldn’t have heard his warning and arrived here so quickly from the upper pastures, the boy calculated. They must have seen the thing for themselves and run like an ibex.
“What is it?” Abadi shouted.
Poppa ignored him, barking the old orders to huddle in the corners and stay quiet. His father hopped in the air and in one quick swipe, grabbed their old rifle from over the kitchen cabinet. Cracking the gun open to check its ammo, he snapped it shut and took up his position beside the doorframe, holding just the tip of the barrel out into open air.
The chopping sound grew ever closer, deafening now. Its vibration became more of a throb in their bodies than a sound in their ears. Atop the room’s small kitchen table, plates and glasses began to rattle and shake.
Abadi turned back to his family. Momma was crying again, by herself in a corner. Poppa had once told him that when she was a little girl, his mother had seen her own momma and poppa shot dead in front of her eyes, and that as a result she did not have the inner hardness to keep quiet. Abadi had no such handicap. He tightened his lips and willed himself not to cry as a huge shadow descended over the house. A roaring wind hurled dirt and bits of grass through the doorway, threatening to blow Poppa back into the far wall.
Poppa winced, frowned, and turned to Momma with a question twisting his face, an overly puzzled look oddly akin to the one he parodied every year on the night of Pesach Seder, when Abadi asked him the Mah Nishtanah, the first of the Four Questions: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
He shouted at her, over the noise of the rotors, “They’re American!”
Now Abadi could no longer contain his curiosity. He edged his toe into the mortar crack below the front windowsill and, as he always did for a view, scrambled up on the edge. And there it was—now so close that it obscured the mountains behind it. A military helicopter complete with bristling gun barrels, mist curling under its rotor wash, and a pilot’s smoked-glass bubble reflecting their house at an odd, cockeyed angle.
It was landing right in front of them.
Then Abadi saw brand-new things, quite different from the Arabic markings and symbols he’d always seen on military equipment.
He saw, painted along the nose, a flag with red and white stripes and a blue corner scattered with stars.
Then motion caught his eye from the helicopter’s flank; a door flew open and a tall man in long green coveralls was running toward them with his head bent, holding the arm of a stooped man in a long black coat whose gray beard flapped sideways in the wind.
Abadi and his brother recognized the second, older man at once.
He looked over at the front door—the rifle was leaning against the wall, and Poppa was already out the door, running toward the old man with his arms open.
Behind the approaching pair, an American commando in full combat gear, brandishing an automatic rifle nearly as long as he was, hopped down and, without even pausing for a look around, sprinted out to the edge of the slope. Another, then another, and a third followed him. All four threw themselves on the ground in succession, propped their weapons from their elbows and began lensing the surrounding mountainside and valley below with wide sweeps of their targeting scopes.
His father paid no attention to them. He was throwing a strong embrace around the Rabbi of Baghdad, the same beloved septuagenarian who, three years before, had driven to their apartment home in the middle of the afternoon with a truck and a driver to move them out to safety. To take them here, out of harm’s way.
That long, long horrible day had begun with a massive explosion knocking out their windows and jarring them from their dawn slumber—a car bomb, right there on their street, not three doors from their own! Then had come a day-long procession of police and ambulances and morgue trucks and well-wishers and idle bystanders gawking at the bloodstains running down the cracks in the street.
The morning had turned into an unbearable afternoon until the rabbi, the very same man now in front of their house—the last rebbe in the country, if rumor was true—entered their apartment all out of breath and full of warnings about further violence and emergency plans.
They had not seen him since late that afternoon, so long ago, when he had walked away from their loaded truck, waving three fingers of his right hand as sole acknowledgment of their shouted thank-you’s. As though saving whole families from murder was a feat akin to retrieving a lost puppy.
And now here he was, having emerged from an American helicopter like some geriatric paratrooper. The strangeness of it certainly didn’t trouble Poppa, who still held the old man locked in a fervent hug.
Finally, the rotors began to slow, and the inferno of noise abated. The two men backed apart. Rabbi Mehl pointed to the man next to him.
“Ebrahim, this is Ari. He is a special emissary from our brothers and sisters in Israel. On a very important mission. My friend, I fear another crisis has overtaken us.”
“And after all this time. . . . ”
“It seems there is another killing campaign under way. Another farhod.”
“Yes. We heard about the al-Feliz girl over the satellite. It is a horrible escalation, is it not?”
“It is indeed. And now you must move. Fast. We have reason to believe they aim to kill or kidnap every remaining Jew in the country.”
Abadi’s father breathed in deeply and slowly so that his chest seemed to hold the air eternally before exhaling again. He took a long look at the mountain landscape before him, as though already bidding it farewell. This had been a difficult, forbidding spot to take his family, but it had proven a successful refuge as well. It had kept them alive. The shine in his eyes betrayed a sudden realization that he had come to love the place more than he had known.
The rabbi put a hand on his shoulder. “Some of the records stolen from our hiding cache several years ago have surfaced in the wrong hands. They know who you are, where you are, where you live. It is only a matter of divine intervention that you have not been attacked already. I am sorry to be so abrupt, as I was with you so many years ago. But we have to move quickly.”
“I understand, Rebbe. And I am very grateful. I will gather my family now.”
“We’ll need to hurry,” Ari spoke up, “because it’s entirely possible you’re being watched right now. And if so, our arrival in this big helicopter would likely trigger an attack.”
“Oh, and another thing, Ebrahim,” said the rabbi. “Do you remember the three cases of old records I sent with you? We’d like to take a look at them right away. First. Even before we leave.”
Ebrahim nodded to his right, toward a flimsy barbed wire fence strung thirty yards away to keep precocious young mountain climbers from straying too close.
“I buried it over here,” he said and walked over toward the enclosure.
Just then, the soldier in the middle held up an arm and barked something. The two men flanking him adjusted their sights—a flat, sharp sound drifted up to th
em on the wind—and just as he reached the fence line, Abadi’s father jerked backward so sharply it seemed he’d been slammed by an invisible battering ram. A fine red spray filled the air beyond him and he fell to the ground with a moan.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Abadi’s mother screamed.
The boy yelled for his father as loud as his lungs would allow him. He started to run for him, but his older brother leaped on top of the boy and drove him to the ground. “Abadi! They’ll kill you!” he shouted into the younger boy’s ear. “Let the soldiers!”
The Americans rose to a kneeling position, shouldered their weapons, and all at once their rifle barrels filled the valley with the roar of gunfire, glints of ejected cartridges, and ribbons of bitter white smoke.
Abadi heard a metallic popping sound, saw the rotors start to move, and realized that the helicopter had also been struck on its side.
Then came a thump and a whoosh! as a rocket-propelled grenade shot away from one of the commando’s shoulders, trailing a thin line of smoke. Across the valley, where a smaller peak met the flatness of his father’s grazing pasture, a tongue of fire and smoke shot upward. A moment later, the sound of an explosion popped in his ears.
Taking advantage of the rocket’s diversion, two of the commandos rushed over to Abadi’s father, picked him up, and began to carry his prone form toward the chopper. All around them, incoming bullets lofted tufts of grass and dirt.
The rotors were rapidly picking up speed. The American officer stood and pulled Abadi to his feet.
“We have to go! Now!” the officer shouted to Ari and Rabbi Mehl.
Ari turned and shook his head.
“I’m not going without those documents!”
“What about you, Rabbi?”
Unable to shout over the noise of the now-spinning rotors, the older man merely grasped his friend’s shoulders, as if to say, I’m staying, too. But thank you . . . .
