An Unexpected Afterlife_A Novel

by Dan Sofer

  Dr. Sandler cupped the tea in her hands and picked a rugalah from a platter of the chocolate pastries. Questions queued in her mind. She licked her fingers and dropped the empty cup in a small garbage bin.

  “This afterlife,” she asked Moshe, “will I like it?”

  Moshe thought for a while. “I’m sure you will. In time. The main thing, they say, is not to be afraid.” He brightened. “Irina will escort you to your ride.” He pointed to a minibus taxi that idled further down the road. The driver, a balding Yemenite, waved.

  Dr. Sandler turned to Moshe. She opened her mouth to ask her question but froze, afraid of the answer she might receive. Moshe seemed to have read her thoughts.

  “The others boarded earlier,” he said. “They’ll be happy to meet you. One of them in particular.” He smiled and added, “She’ll be very happy indeed.”

  CHAPTER 68

  Moshe joined in the chorus of voices. “Hi, Avner.”

  Galit sat beside him in the circle of a dozen chairs. He rested his hand on her knee and then retracted it. He had returned home two weeks ago, but he still slept on the couch downstairs. Galit was still adjusting to his presence. He shouldn’t push his luck. Talya, on the other hand, had showered him with hugs and requests for bedtime stories, although that was probably thanks to his ready supply of her favorite candy: Elite strawberry-flavored toffee in a pink wrapper.

  Avner, a gaunt young man in a black T-shirt, cleared his throat and told his story.

  Night had fallen on Jaffa Street outside the window. The office space of Karlin & Son had not seen this much activity in months. At its current rate of growth, the Dry Bones Society would need to expand into the neighboring offices. Expansion required money, and that depended on tonight.

  So far that evening, they had met an accountant (suicide), a Romanian construction worker (fall from scaffolding), and a doctor and her grown daughter.

  Shmuel folded his arms over his chest and listened. He had still refused to discuss his own death, and it seemed he never would.

  Across the circle, Rabbi Yosef smiled and nodded, encouraging the stranger who had joined their ranks.

  The meeting concluded with the singing of “HaTikva”—the national anthem—and Rabbi Nachman’s “Narrow Bridge,” followed by mingling at the refreshments tables. Savta Sarah wore her apron and pushed stuffed cabbage and meatballs on her grateful clientele.

  Rabbi Yosef remained in his seat. His shoulders slumped and a haze of sadness hung over him. Moshe knew what tonight meant for him. His life would never be the same.

  “One moment,” Moshe told Galit. He was walking over to the rabbi when Samira called for their attention. “Everyone!” she said from the edge of a cubicle. “It’s starting!”

  The legs of a dozen plastic chairs squeaked and Moshe retook his seat beside Galit. Irina aimed a remote at the large mounted television and switched to Channel Ten.

  The stony hillside of Jerusalem panned across the screen. The camera cut to the cemetery in East Jerusalem. A man walked among the rows of tombstones. He wore a blue polo shirt.

  “One summer’s morning,” said the voice of Eran, Shmuel’s reporter friend, “Rami Alon awoke in the Mount of Olives Cemetery, naked and alone. He found his way home and made a shocking discovery: he had died three years earlier in a car crash.”

  On screen, Rami knocked on the door of a house and fell into the embrace of his beautiful wife and two teenage children. A close-up showed the happy family on a living room couch.

  “We thought we had lost Rami forever,” said the beautiful wife, holding his hand. “But God gave us a second chance.”

  The narrator continued. “Others have received a second chance as well, but not all were as fortunate as Rami.”

  The camera showed Moshe walking down Shimshon Street. The offices of Karlin & Son erupted in cheers and applause, and a smile stole onto Moshe’s face. He had never appeared on television before.

  “Moshe Karlin awoke two years after a fatal heart attack and found himself on the street.”

  Galit gave him an apologetic pout. He had asked Eran to tone down the story for the sake of his wife and the reporter had kept his word.

  The television framed Moshe as he sat at his desk. “My daughter didn’t recognize me,” he told the camera. “I had lost everything I held dear. I needed help.”

  “One man,” the reporter continued, “came to Moshe’s aid: Yosef Lev, the rabbi of Moshe’s neighborhood synagogue.” Rabbi Yosef filled the screen with his dreamy smile. More cheers from the group.

  “We are witnessing the fulfillment of biblical prophecies,” said the rabbi. “The Resurrection is one stage of the Final Redemption.”

  The real-world Rabbi Yosef watched the screen but did not smile. This was it. He had sided—on national television—with the dreaded demons of the Other Side.

  “How does the Resurrection process work?” Eran the reporter asked.

  “It is a great miracle,” the smiling rabbi said. “Our ancient writings talk of the Dew of Resurrection, which recreates the physical body from the Luz, a small, indestructible bone in the spine.”

  The camera shifted to the tiered campus of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. “Others,” the narrator said, “have provided less miraculous explanations. We spoke with Professor Yakov Malkovich of the Hebrew University.”

  A bespectacled man with tufts of white cotton candy hair sat behind a large desk. Certificates and awards graced the walls behind him. He was not a happy old man.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Utter garbage. People do not spontaneously regenerate.”

  “Then how do you explain the people who have returned from the grave?”

  The professor shrugged. “An elaborate hoax.”

  Eran the reporter appeared on the screen. He walked between rows of gravestones. “Ezekiel’s Resurrection or a clever prank? One thing is for sure: the number of the self-proclaimed resurrected has grown. They come from all segments of Israeli society, and they claim to share a peculiar physical irregularity.” He patted his paunch. “No belly button. Some of them have formed a non-profit to provide social and economic aid to their fellow new arrivals.”

  Moshe appeared again, sitting at his desk. “Rejection by family and friends. Exploitation. Bureaucratic difficulties. That is why we started the Dry Bones Society.”

  The shot cut to a circle of men and women sitting on plastic chairs in the office space where Moshe now sat. A balding man stood and spoke from the heart while the others listened.

  Moshe’s voice continued in the background. “We depend entirely on donations. If you’re resurrected and have the means, or if you’d just like to help, please call our toll-free number.” Then Moshe’s face filled the screen. “Who knows?” he said, his expression earnest. “Your dear departed loved ones might need our help right now.”

  Moshe stood up in the middle of the room and clapped his hands together. “That’s our cue, friends. Battle stations!”

  As the toll-free number displayed on the screen, men and women—Jews and Arabs, established Israelis and new immigrants—ran to cubicles and donned headsets. Irina switched the television to the display Moshe had set up ahead of time.

  The counter of incoming calls remained a large, round zero on the screen.

  Moshe rested his arm on the cubicle divider. He heard the sound of his own breathing. He felt every pair of eyes on him. The office lease ended in two weeks. Their fledgling organization had burned through the little cash they had scrabbled together. The Dry Bones Society needed an urgent infusion of money. Every person in the room knew that.

  A telephone rang. The incoming call counter rose by one. Shmuel raised his hand above the cubicle wall. “I got it.” He clicked a button on his terminal. “Dry Bones Society,” he said, as Moshe had scripted. “Shmuel speaking. How can I help you?”

  Moshe heard the sound of his own heart beating. The entire room soaked up every word and inflection.

  “Yes. Yes? Thank
you. Thank you very much!” He put his hand over the microphone. “A hundred shekels!” A cheer and a short burst of applause. “Let me take your credit card details.”

  A hundred shekels. Not much but a start.

  The Total Sales counter jumped from zero to one hundred. A sober silence descended on the waiting army of phone reps.

  Then the phone bell rang again. And again. The incoming call counter moved from one to two to seven.

  Irina punched the air. “One thousand shekels!” she cried. No cheers this time. The others were too busy fielding calls with donors.

  Total Sales now covered three months’ rent and change. Reporters called in, picking up the story and verifying facts. A few cynics and pranksters too.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Rabbi Yosef head for the door, his head low. “I’ll call you back,” Moshe told a correspondent from Israel Today. He caught the rabbi in the quiet of the corridor.

  “Rabbi Yosef.” The rabbi turned and managed a brief smile. “Thank you. For everything.”

  He left the details unspoken. The rabbi would lose his job, for sure. Moshe had realized this too late. He had overheard the rabbi talking on the phone with the rabbanit. A contingent of rabbis had visited the Lev household on Shimshon Street last week to deliver the ultimatum.

  “And,” Moshe continued, “I’m glad to offer you our first full-time position.”

  The rabbi lifted his head. “Full-time?”

  “Or as full-time as you’d like. Our members need guidance and counseling. Who better to help them than you?”

  The rabbi’s lips parted. His back straightened, and the sparkle returned to his eyes. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes. And, just between you and me, you’re the only candidate. You’re the only non-founder with a valid identity card.”

  The rabbi laughed in earnest for the first time in days.

  He shook Moshe’s hand and continued down the corridor, a new spring in his step.

  Moshe studied the door of frosted glass. Someone had taped a white page with the words “Dry Bones Society” over “Karlin & Son.”

  “There you are!” Galit peered around the door. She followed his line of sight. “They’d be proud of you,” she said. “Very proud.”

  Moshe inflated his lungs. Mending broken lives probably trumped taxi dispatch on the cosmic scales of merit. “I think so too.”

  “Working late tonight?” There was no hint of reproach in her voice.

  Moshe visualized his checklist. He had grand plans for the Dry Bones Society: fundraising, lobbying, expansion, medical drives, and education. He didn’t know where to begin.

  “Nope,” he said. “Strictly office hours from now on. Besides, one late night won’t scratch the surface. We’re only getting started.”

  “All right then,” she said, with a mischievous glint in her eye. She took his arm in hers and led him to the elevator. “Let’s go home.”

  Turn the page for a bonus ebook.

  AUTHOR NOTES

  Hi there and thanks for reading.

  The adventures of the Dry Bones Society continue in book 2, An Accidental Messiah.

  Before you click through to the next book, here's a quick thought from me:

  As an independent author, I am also the publisher and marketer of my books. The downside is that I have to spend a lot of time marketing the books - time that I could otherwise spend writing.

  The good news: The more reviews my books have, the less marketing I need to do, and the more time I can spend writing.

  So, if you enjoyed An Unexpected Afterlife and would like to get to read more books in the series (as well as other books I'm planning) please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon.

  Your review will help readers discover my work, and you'll also make my day!

  The review can be as short (or long) as you like. Reviewers often mention their general impression of the book and/or liken it to other books they have enjoyed. (There's no need to summarize the plot. Note: you may be asked to log into Amazon before you can leave a review.)

  Click the link below to leave a review:

  http://smarturl.it/dbs1-r

  Have a great day.

  ~ Dan Sofer

  Turn the page for a bonus ebook.

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  The Dry Bones Society, Book II: An Accidental Messiah

  Click here to get the next book in the series, or continue reading with the excerpt below...

  AN ACCIDENTAL MESSIAH, CHAPTER 1

  The tour guide had just welcomed his first group of the day to the Mount Herzl National Cemetery when he saw the naked man. Among the bushes at the edge of the Jerusalem Forest, the pale streaker scratched his head and stroked the stately brown beard that fell to his chest.

  Despite having been trained to handle this exact situation, the tour guide choked up, and his group of Japanese tourists, with their matching yellow hats and oversized cameras, chattered among themselves and eyed their catatonic guide with concern.

  He had approached the rumors with a healthy dose of skepticism at first—after all, dead people didn’t spontaneously rise from their graves—until early one morning a fellow guide had discovered a man, naked and alone, among the tombstones of the military cemetery. The former soldier had saved his brothers-in-arms by diving onto a grenade during the Second Lebanon War. A camera crew had arrived to immortalize the moment of his return, and the number of visitors to the park had spiked—resurrection tourists mostly—but after a few days life on Mount Herzl had returned to normal.

  Over the following weeks, however, more casualties sprouted from their graves: shell-shocked tank drivers of the Yom Kippur War; commando fighters of the Six Day War; and then the waves of gaunt Eastern Europeans mowed down during the War of Independence.

  The phenomenon, bizarre and surreal by any standard, soon became routine, and they no longer bothered to notify the media when a long-deceased Jew turned up among the hedges. They did notice one trend: as time progressed, the arrivals returned from further back in the past, and the guides placed bets on which of them—if any of them at all—would welcome back to the land of the living the personage enshrined at the heart of the national park.

  Today was this guide’s lucky day.

  “One moment,” he told the Japanese tourists in English, as he hurried over to the bushes.

  The naked man looked him over with suspicion. By God, it’s him! the guide thought. He had seen a hundred photos of the man and studied his life in detail, but today the statesman had stepped out of the pages of history—and the grave—and into the present.

  The man held his head high, despite his embarrassing state of undress. “Wo bin ich?”

  “Pardon me?” For the first time since graduating from university, the guide wished that he had studied German as a third language instead of Arabic.

  The man sighed and switched to English. “Where am I?”

  The guide delivered the good news with glee. “In Jerusalem, sir, the capital of Israel—the Jewish State!”

  A satisfied smile curled the man’s lips and a fire burned in his dark eyes. “We did it!” He clenched a victorious fist in the air. Then he winced and massaged his temple. “Mein kopf!”

  Remembering his training, the guide reached into his shoulder bag and tore open the DBS First Responder Kit. He helped the man into the thick spa gown with the words Dry Bones Society sewn onto the back and then handed him the two Acamol tablets and the small bottle of mineral water.

  The man popped the pills and washed them down, then blinked as cameras flashed. The Japanese had caught up and were documenting the historic event.

  “Friends,” the guide said to his audience. “I present to you Mr. Theodore Herzl, the Visionary of the State!”

  Herzl stepped out from the bushes, bowed his head, and posed with the guide for the cameras.

&
nbsp; Then he gazed at the sculpted gardens and stone paths. “What is this place?”

  “Mount Herzl, the national cemetery named after you. Your tomb is over there, in the center.” The guide pointed. “I’ll show you.”

  Herzl slipped on the pair of spa slippers, also courtesy of the DBS, and they walked along a path of rock slabs.

  “When was the State established?”

  “1948.”

  “So late?”

  “The road to nationhood was long and winding, but I think you’ll be proud of the result. The land has thrived, the desert bloomed. Jews have returned from all over the world. We have an Israeli government and army, technology and culture.”

  “And yet you do not speak German?”

  “Hebrew is the official language, along with Arabic and English. English has become the language of science and culture.”

  “English? How strange.”

  “Times have changed. You died over a hundred years ago.”

  “A hundred years? Incredible!”

  They arrived at the large central plaza of white Jerusalem stone and approached the prominent slab of black granite in the center of a circle of grass. The name Herzl was etched into the tombstone.

  Herzl sucked in a deep breath. A summer breeze ruffled his hair as he stared at his own grave. Tearing up, he turned to the guide and shook his hand. “I thank you for fulfilling my wishes and bringing my remains to the Jewish State. But how did you revive me?”

  Once again, the guide leaned on his training. The instructor from the Dry Bones Society had warned the guides not to overwhelm the new arrivals with information. “You have many questions,” he said, using the instructor’s words. “We will answer them in time as best we can.”

  “A hundred years,” Herzl repeated. “My children must have passed on already. Their children too. Tell me—what role did they play in the founding of the State?” A hopeful smile made his lips tremble. “Was my son the first chancellor?”