Alpha and Omega
Page 31
Before long, he wasn’t going down any more. He was going up toward the Temple Mount. More dead rose at every moment. Some called to him in Hebrew; some, ancient ones in strange garments, in Aramaic; some in Arabic—the Muslims had put a cemetery in front of the Golden Gate, too.
That gate had stayed closed for more than 1,200 years. It had…till the Palestinians’ mortar bomb blasted it open again. The way was narrow, but Chaim squeezed through. And the dead streamed after him into Jerusalem.
Yitzhak Avigad watched the sacrifice from the Temple Mount. He had IDF binoculars. They didn’t put him right there, but they let him see what was going on. That would do.
When a boy ran over to Rabbi Kupferman, Yitzhak knew it was Chaim. His nephew had gone on about how he didn’t want Rosie killed. She mattered more to him than to any of the other boys; he’d been along when Yitzhak accepted her.
The binoculars didn’t magnify sound. Yitzhak couldn’t hear what was going on on the Mount of Olives. Whatever it was, it didn’t go very far. Two guys grabbed Chaim and hung on to him. The ceremony proceeded as if nothing had happened.
As if. Yitzhak wondered why those words echoed. Things weren’t finished over there, and he wasn’t just thinking of the sacrifice. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. He watched, waited, and worried.
Kupferman cut the red heifer’s throat. He caught the blood in his cupped hand and sprinkled it toward the Temple Mount. He lit the heifer’s pyre. Then he held up the cedar, hyssop, and scarlet and cast them into the flames. Yitzhak had imagined the ceremony so often, he hardly seemed to be seeing it for the first time.
All the drama should have been over. After the pyre burned itself out, the ashes would be prepared following the ancient rules. That would take some time; you needed a lot to char a carcass. Yitzhak didn’t know why he kept watching so intently.
It was like being in the Army again. Sometimes you couldn’t say why you knew gunmen holed up in one house and not another, but you did. And you’d be right most of the time, too. People talked about vibes or feelings or hunches. The hair prickled up on the back of his neck. It wasn’t over, there on the Mount of Olives.
He groaned when Chaim jumped down from the sacrificial platform and ran back toward Jerusalem. Ritual purity gone…Then Yitzhak brightened. Not necessarily, not with the red heifer’s ashes to restore it.
He wasn’t the only one watching from the Temple Mount. “What’s that crazy kid doing?” said somebody. Yitzhak glanced over. The man wore khaki, with a brigadier general’s crossed swords on his shoulder straps.
“What the—?” Startled exclamations rose from several places. Yitzhak’s attention snapped back to his nephew. Something was going on around Chaim. Even without binoculars, Yitzhak could tell as much. It looked as if the air around him was boiling—almost like heat waves from the ground on a scorching day. This was stronger than any heat waves Yitzhak had ever seen or imagined.
When he raised the field glasses…For a heartbeat, he didn’t believe what he saw. He thought he was in a theater watching a movie full of special effects. If those writhing, half-transparent things weren’t ghosts, what were they?
What indeed?
And if they were ghosts…What then? Why would ghosts come forth? Why would they throng around Chaim as he dashed across the Kidron Valley toward the Temple Mount? Why would they follow him that way? Why, unless he was…?
“No,” Yitzhak whispered. But he’d known cats bigger than newborn Chaim. He’d changed the kid’s diapers. It wasn’t angels that came out of there, either. When you’d done that stuff, it was hard to think you might be looking at…
The Messiah?
“You’ve got to be out of your mind,” Yitzhak said. The brigadier glanced toward him and sidled away a couple of steps.
But if his nephew wasn’t, how was he raising the dead? What else would you call this? Yitzhak shivered. Even Chaim’s name meant life.
“It’s the Messiah. He’s the Messiah. Who else can he be?” That was a member of the Knesset—not a man from the ruling coalition, but a Labor stalwart about as secular as any Israeli ever born. Yitzhak had no idea why he would have wanted to come here. If he was saying things like this…
Yitzhak’s thoughts trailed away in confusion. Why not, when his nephew’d started working miracles before his eyes?
He wondered how Mary and Joseph felt when Jesus started doing impossible things around the house. That was absurd on several different levels, but he hadn’t dreamt his nephew was the Messiah. As far as he knew, Chaim hadn’t, either.
So what was he doing raising the dead?
It was a good question. He wished he had a good answer.
Chaim ran through the Golden Gate. He couldn’t have done that if the Palestinians’ big mortar hadn’t busted it up. What were they thinking right now? Yitzhak started to laugh. He would have paid money to see their faces.
* * *
—
“It’s impossible!” Haji Jamal Ashrawi howled as ghosts swirled up around the Jewish boy running through the graveyard. “It’s a special effect, like the ones in the movies!”
But even a bodyguard betrayed him. “Is it, Haji?” the man asked. “Is it really? See how scared the kid looks? He didn’t expect this to happen—you can tell.” Several of the other armed men nodded.
“No, by God!” Ashrawi insisted. “He has to be an actor! He’s the Jew who tried to get the old man not to cut the cow’s throat. If this isn’t a script, what is it?”
“Maybe,” the guard said—not as if he agreed with the Grand Mufti, as if he was still open to argument. “How will we tell?”
That was a shrewd question. Haji Jamal answered, “Look—he’s running through a Jewish cemetery now. If more ghosts come up when he gets to the Muslim cemetery closer to the Golden Gate, we’ll know he’s a fraud. Muslim dead would not rise for a Jew.”
He thought that nailed things down tight. But the bodyguard said, “Unless he really is the Messiah.”
“Don’t be silly!” the Grand Mufti said. “How could a Jew be the Messiah?”
“God can do whatever He pleases.” The guard was stubborn.
“God gave us Muhammad, the Seal of Prophets—peace be unto him—to teach us how to live,” Haji Jamal said. “He doesn’t need to have anything to do with Jews who wouldn’t accept the Prophet when he was there before them, and who still deny Him now.”
The guard grunted. “It’s possible,” he said at last—as much of an admission as Ashrawi was likely to get.
With ghosts boiling around him on the TV screen, the Jewish boy ran on. Ashrawi sometimes thought he could make out faces, mouths and eyes wide open. Other times, it was all swirling motion. It centered on the boy, and trailed after him.
“Here’s the Muslim cemetery,” Ashrawi said. “Now we’ll see.”
More ghosts rose. These looked like Muslims, not Jews. When you could make out clothing, it was clothing Arabs might wear. Some was the kind they might have worn in days long gone. Whoever directed these special effects paid attention to detail. But they could only be special effects.
He said as much.
“It’s possible,” the bodyguard repeated. Haji Jamal almost kicked him. But he restrained himself. Jerusalem would need a new Grand Mufti if he yielded to temptation. He didn’t believe that a Jew could raise the dead, and he wasn’t about to gamble he might be wrong.
* * *
—
Yes, there were times when Gabriela wished she hadn’t invited the Reverend Lester Stark to the Holy Land. Because Shlomo Kupferman was irked at Stark, she and the minister had to comment on the sacrifice of the red heifer by what they could see from studio monitors. Stark hadn’t wangled an invitation to the Mount of Olives or even the Temple Mount for their camera crew. Kupferman might have said, This is ours. It’s not for goyim to mess with.
“Our Jewish brethren find this purification ceremony most important,” he said. By his tone, he might have been narrating a 1950s documentary about the natives’ quaint customs.
That tone pissed Gabriela off, and she wasn’t Jewish or observant. Not even Brandon, shit that he was, would have sounded so condescending. But Brandon was dead of his own arrogance, and Gabriela stuck with the reverend.
“Jewish people believe the sacrifice of the red heifer is enough to render things its ashes touch ritually pure,” Stark went on. “I could do worse than to quote Hebrews 9:13–14: ‘If the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the defiled, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?’ ”
This isn’t Sermonette, dammit, Gabriela thought. She could cut some in the edits if Lester piled it on too thick. But she didn’t want people thinking she agreed with everything he said, so she remarked, “Hebrews is in the New Testament, though.” She knew that much, anyhow. “People who don’t accept that as the word of God aren’t bound by what it says.”
They’d already had this argument off camera. Now they could have it on-. Again, Gabriela would just have to see if it stayed in later. But Stark, being a trained minister, could wheel out the theological heavy guns and let fly with them. You’re so smart, why didn’t you remember that sooner? she thought.
Before they could start making like liberals and conservatives on a CNN panel, though, one of the kids who’d crossed the causeway on oxback tried to interrupt the ceremony. Stark came on point like a good bird dog. “Here’s something Rabbi Kupferman didn’t expect!” he exclaimed. He could be a terrific analyst when he steered clear of the pulpit.
Things weren’t different enough. Whatever the kid tried, it didn’t work. And Kupferman had as much bend as a boulder. Once a couple of ox-handlers corraled the youngster, the rabbi cut the red heifer’s throat.
Here was a deliberate killing on camera, going out to Israel and the world (though little to the USA, which was hinky about such things). Gabriela wondered how people watching it live liked it. That boy wasn’t the only sign the world had got more squeamish the past two millennia. Watching the heifer’s carcass burn might also turn a stomach or two—million.
When the kid who’d tried to stop things jumped off the platform, Stark gasped. “He’s been ritually pure his whole life,” he said. “He just threw it all away.”
Gabriela found herself nodding. Sure enough, this was the kind of commentary she wanted from the minister. “When he’s older, do you think he’ll regret what he’s done?” she asked.
“In his place, I would, given what he’s always believed,” Stark said.
The boy ran down the Mount of Olives. A camera followed him. He was a lot more dramatic than the pyre and the heifer. He ran through the Jewish cemetery…and strange things began to happen.
Lester Stark caught it fast—ahead of Gabriela. “What are we seeing?” he asked sharply. “It looks like—ghosts?—are surrounding the boy as he runs. Can that be possible?”
“Yes. Look!” Gabriela’s voice rose in excitement as she responded. “You can see them rising from the ground as the boy runs past, rising and hurrying after him!”
You could see them, but for her seeing wasn’t necessarily believing. Since video-editing software came along, you could do anything with images. With enough money and computing power, you could do it in real time. Did Israeli TV have enough? As Saul Buchbinder would have said, did the Pope shit in the woods?
Then the TV feed cut to the people on the Temple Mount who’d been watching the ceremony. They looked as if they’d just staggered out of a car crash. All their faces had that poleaxed expression. Their eyes were seeing what the monitor showed.
Or else they were fake, too. Gabriela shook her head. She didn’t believe it. That would have taken advance planning, and would have meant the kid was scripted from the git-go. She couldn’t imagine Shlomo Kupferman playing along.
“Unless I’m completely off-base, that young man is raising the dead,” Lester Stark said. “I can see two explanations for that.”
“You’re two up on me, Reverend,” Gabriela said. “When I see something impossible, I know there’s no explanation for it. What else does impossible mean?”
But raising the dead evidently wasn’t among things that couldn’t happen for Stark. He said, “One possibility is that this young man is the Jewish Messiah. That goes against everything I ever believed, but it could be.”
Gabriela admired the admission. It took moral courage, not a quality in large supply these days. She asked, “What’s the other one?”
“That we’re witnessing the advent of the Antichrist, his miracles powered not by God but by Satan.”
Too much! Gabriela thought. Way too much! He’s trying to get us thrown all the way out of Israel, not just exiled to this studio. She made a chopping motion with her right hand, and sound recording stopped. “How much hot water are you trying to land us in, Reverend?” she asked. “A Jewish kid who doesn’t shave yet is the Antichrist? Come on!”
The way Stark looked back chilled her. He might be wrong, but he was serious. “I didn’t say he was the Antichrist,” Stark replied. “I said he might be. And he might. Too many strange things have happened lately to leave anything in Scripture out of the mix. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”
Gabriela thought about it. She remembered the floating Ark, Brandon dropping dead on live TV (instead of me, she thought with one more internal shiver), missiles disappearing in midair, and the writing on the wall of the suddenly defunct President of Iran’s office. She remembered some other things, too.
Shivering again, she shook her head. “I guess not. I don’t know anything about anything any more.”
Lester Stark gave back the thinnest of smiles. “We’re even.”
* * *
—
Eric Katz stood on the Temple Mount, watching the Jewish kid run through the graveyard and…stuff happening around him. Even through the field glasses he and Orly passed back and forth, he had trouble making out what was up on the Mount of Olives.
He shook his head. The trouble lay between his ears. He could see what was going on. He could see it, but he was damned if he believed it.
“He’s raising the dead,” Orly said. “He is.”
“But that’s impossible.” Eric couldn’t blame it on special effects—not through binoculars—but he would have if he could.
Orly gave him a look that came not only from another planet but from another time as well. “I know.” She sounded calmer than anyone had any business being. “He’s doing it anyway. Possible and impossible don’t matter any more, Eric. Don’t you get it?”
He did. The difference between understanding and liking was wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and real as a right to the jaw. He hadn’t thought anybody, including God, could raise the dead. He’d figured that when you died, you were gone. Evidently not. Which meant…what?
Good question. If there was life after death, people would be arguing about what it meant for the next 10,000 years.
If God didn’t decide to ring down the curtain sooner than that, anyhow. By the look of things, He was liable to. If this wasn’t the beginning of the End of Days…then it was something else. As the old song put it, it was the start of something big.
Not far away, Yoram Louvish peered down into the valley with his own binocs. With the Israeli archaeologist was a guy Eric di
dn’t know: early forties, black hair, a dark beard streaked with gray. Not least to escape Orly’s terrifying truths, Eric walked over to them. Orly came along, so he didn’t escape. All the same, he asked Yoram, “What do you think?”
“I think God is doing strange things. A Messiah without a beard?” Yoram answered in Hebrew, which Eric had also used. No, I didn’t escape, Eric thought. Then Yoram switched to English: “Eric, this is Keith Rosenthal. He’s over from Chicago to do something perverse to the university computer system. Keith, Eric Katz. He’s like me—he’d rather deal with tablets and potsherds than Windows.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Keith said. He stuck out a hand. “Hi, Eric.”
“Hi.” Eric shook. They grinned at each other: one American Jew with a Norse first name, the other with a Celtic. Carrying a handle that fit in with the dominant culture went back at least as far as Flavius Josephus, likely further.
Yoram raised the field glasses again. “He’s going through the Muslim cemetery now, and the dead there are rising, too,” he said, sticking to English.
“This is weird, man,” Keith Rosenthal said. “I mean, I’m Jewish, but—”
“Tell me about it,” Eric said. Orly let out a small sniff, as if to say she could tell him plenty. For an Israeli to hold back might have done for a miracle if Eric hadn’t witnessed too many fancier ones lately.
Now he and Yoram had to lean over the wall to see what the kid was doing. If I fall and break my neck, will my ghost rise up and follow him? Eric didn’t want to find out.
The boy had plenty of ghosts on his trail. They looked half real, half like curdled air. Some were plainly Jews, some Muslims. A couple might have been Crusaders. Some went back…God only knew how far. Eric shivered. One more true cliché.
If the kid trotted by a Neandertal skeleton, what would happen? How long till an anthropologist started wondering about that? Before the End of Days?