Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  The Rabbi said emotionally, “The Babylonian Talmud tells us: ‘Of the ten measures of beauty that came down to the world, Jerusalem took nine.’”

  “If the windows were not bricked in,” the Doctor said, “you could look out on the holy city of your King David.”

  “I bless God, I thank you, Ishmael. If I am to die, let me die in Jerusalem.”

  “Let us talk no more of dying, ya’ani.” Raising a glass of grape juice, the Doctor proposed a toast in Hebrew. “Ad meya v-esream—may you live to a hundred and twenty.”

  The Rabbi tossed a single bony shoulder. “You’ll see, Ishmael,” he said sulkily. “Eight o’clock will come and go, and nine, and ten, and there will be no Palestinian prisoners talking to reporters on the Lebanese side of the border. Ha! This will turn out to be the last supper after all.”

  Sweeney picked up a lamb chop with his fingers and began to nibble on it. He wondered if he would be able to reconstruct the conversation from memory. It was surreal. The blind leading the blind, the Doctor had said. The mad leading the mad would have been closer to the truth. He decided to needle the Rabbi. “If this is the last supper,” he ventured, “that makes you the Messiah. From a journalistic point of view, this has to be the scoop of the century. The Islamic Renewer and the Jewish Messiah in the same room! At the same table!”

  Apfulbaum inched his cushion closer to the Doctor and the two men gazed into each other’s unseeing eyes. “Ishmael,” he declared with fervor as saliva seeped from the corner of his mouth, “is surely the long-awaited Renewer for whom the Islamic world is waiting with baited breath. As for me being Messiah …” The Rabbi’s jaw trembled. He hauled the silver worry beads from his pocket and began working them through his bony fingers. “I have never told this to anyone before, Ishmael. When I was a Talmudic student in a Brooklyn yeshiva, there were some who whispered I was Messiah. When the others around me were still learning to read, I gave interpretations of Torah that flabbergasted my teachers. It was said of me that if I started out in a storm, to the left of me was rain, to the right of me was rain, but where I was there was only sunshine. It was said of me that if I started out on Friday and the sun set while I was on the road, to the left of me was Shabbat, to the right of me was Shabbat, but where I was it was still Friday. My father, Apfulbaum the grocer at the A & P on Albany Avenue, God rest his soul, had a nickname for me as a child. So ask the Eastern Parkway Messiah, he’d say when he didn’t know the answer to something.” The Rabbi swatted a large tear from the corner of an eye with the back of his hand. “I’m not saying I am Messiah, I’m not saying I’m not, I’m only saying—what am I saying?—that it is within the realm of possibility. Ha! The Renewer and the Messiah, side by side! Think of the puissance of it! Together we could set the world back on the straight path. It goes without saying but I’ll say it, what do I have to lose? Jesus of Nazareth was a false Messiah, the Koran tells us that, all Muslims are convinced, all Jews, too.”

  The Doctor ground out his cigarette on the sole of a shoe and dropped the filter tip into an ashtray on the table. “There is no place in Islam for a god who permits his enemies to execute him on a cross,” he exclaimed, caught up in Apfulbaum’s fantasy.

  “No place in Judaism, either,” the Rabbi agreed eagerly. “The putative son of God, the King of the Yids, oy, oy, he maybe never walked on water but he got one part of the myth right: Messiah has to die for his people!”

  “What does he babble about?” Aown asked his brother in Arabic.

  “It can only be the odor of kosher food that has unsettled him,” Azziz replied.

  Sweeney looked from the Rabbi to the Doctor and back again. Clearly, the constant menace of a bullet in the brain had pushed Apfulbaum over the edge. It was common, in situations like this, for the victim to fall in love with his captor as a way of protecting himself. But the Rabbi seemed to have fallen in love with death. The Renewer! The Messiah! They were both mad as hatters.

  The Rabbi, his voice pitched half an octave higher, rambled on. “I’m not perfect, who is? But you don’t have to be perfect to be Messiah. King David wasn’t perfect. When he coveted Bathsheba, he excarnated the competition by rerouting her husband, Uriah, to certain death in the forefront of the battle.”

  “Even the holy Messenger Muhammad was not perfect,” the Doctor observed. “The Qur’an, 93:7 if my memory serves, records that God found the Prophet erring and gave him guidance.”

  “Perfection,” the Rabbi noted, smacking his lips in satisfaction at the end of each phrase, “is like the horizon. You race in a motor boat towards it from morning till night … at the end of the day it’s still beyond reach.”

  “That is beautifully put, ya’ani.”

  The Rabbi turned on the journalist. “You are not in the same league as Ishmael and me, Mr. whatever your name is. You and I don’t talk the same language. The so-called Western liberalism about which you’re so smug is man-oriented. Its pride and glory are Hollywood films and slick magazines with naked ladies on the cover and upwardly mobile Wall Street yuppies clambering over each other to get to the top of the garbage heap known as Western civilization. And at the top of the heap is what? Oy, I’ll tell you what. At the top of the heap are penthouse apartments with wrap-around stereo speakers playing dirty rap music, and dope and divorce and abortion on demand, not to mention extra-marital monkey business and same sex marriages. Same sex marriages! My God, what will they invent next?” The words were spilling out so fast the Rabbi had difficulty catching his breath. “So what, in your opinion,” he said, gasping for air, “is America’s greatest contribution to the Middle East, Mr. whatever your name is? I’ll tell you what. Air-conditioned supermarkets with junk food on one side of the aisles and health food on the other.” Apfulbaum lowered his voice. “For God’s sake, don’t print this in your newspaper but an Israeli, when he wants good food, eats in an Arab restaurant.”

  The Doctor rocked back and forth in agreement. “An Arab who wants good medical care goes to a Jewish doctor. This is well known.”

  “And what today stands against your man-oriented Western liberalism?” Apfulbaum demanded, cocking his head. “I’ll tell you what.” He hissed like a snake. “Torah Judaism, and its kissing cousin, Koranic Islamism, stand against it. Torah Judaism and Koranic Islamism are Allah-oriented. Their pride, their glory are God and God’s word. At the top of the heap is Paradise—”

  “‘Gardens of Eden,’” the Doctor breathed, “‘underneath which rivers flow.’” He peered through the haze of his impaired vision, trying to perceive the Rabbi’s saintly features as he added, “‘God is well-pleased with them who fear the Lord.’”

  Apfulbaum’s head bobbed deliriously as he batted the compliment back. “‘Blessed is he who blesses you,’” he whispered huskily.

  “You are talking too much and not eating,” the Doctor chided his neighbor. “Here—you will need your strength. Think of the press conferences you will hold after your release. Think of the talk shows you will be invited to. You will have the entire world at your feet.”

  He edged the bowl closer to the Rabbi. Apfulbaum picked up a fork and toyed with his food. He filled his mouth with couscous and a morsel of zucchini, then spit it back into the bowl. He was too excited to swallow. Glancing in the direction of Petra, he mumbled an apology with a well-turned Arabic phrase. She pulled the scarf up around her face as her eyes wrinkled at the corners in a pleased grin.

  At a nod from the Doctor, Petra cleared away the bowls and set out kitchen tumblers and a pewter pot filled with steaming sweetened tea. She sank cross legged onto the floor behind the Doctor as he filled the tumblers. He began pouring with the spout touching the glass and deftly swooped up the pot until the tea was cascading through the air into the tumbler. He could tell from the sound when the glass was full. From somewhere in the streets below came the electric whine of a loudspeaker. Gradually the clamor grew louder and more distinct. Everyone around the table heard it. Conversation stopped. Sweeney angled his he
ad, straining to make out the words. “It’s Hebrew,” he said. “What’s she saying?”

  “It’s one of those Israeli state lottery sound trucks,” the Rabbi said. “The voice of Western liberalism is telling people they can win twelve million shekels if they pick the right number.”

  Petra said in Hebrew, “This is the first time I have heard them advertise the lottery in the Old City.”

  “At least they had the decency to wait until Ramadan was over,” the Rabbi noted.

  Sweeney took hold of Aown’s wrist and pushed up the shirt sleeve to see his wristwatch. Aown, annoyed, jerked his arm free.

  The Doctor slid a glass filled with tea across the table to the American journalist. Sweeney, his brow creased, seemed lost in thought. “What? Oh. None for me. I’m not a tea drinker.”

  “Well, we won’t oblige you, will we, Isaac?”

  But the Rabbi, his eyes glazed over, was in another world. “If I am to survive after all, there is no hope for me,” he whispered. Then he remembered Hertzl’s famous dictum and brightened. “To succeed in a great enterprise,” he murmured, “it is necessary to be without hope.”

  His lips kept forming words long after sounds ceased to emerge from his throat.

  FORTY-SIX

  AVELVETY DUSK SETTLED LIKE SOOT ON THE ROOFS OF THE OLD City. High on the Temple Mount, the golden dome of the great mosque seemed to tarnish in the deepening shadows. Along the narrow cobblestone streets, shop owners winched metal shutters down over store windows as the last tourists started back toward their hotels. Arab men in Western clothing crowded into coffee shops and plucked the backgammon boards off the shelves and talked in excited undertones of Abu Bakr’s stunning triumph over the Jews. At seven, they interrupted their games to crowd around giant color television sets and catch the latest news bulletin: two buses with blackened windows, preceded and followed by a flotilla of police cars, had been spotted heading north from Haifa toward the Lebanese border; the Isra’ili Prime Minister, under heavy fire from the opposition, which was calling for a vote of no-confidence in the Knesset, had scheduled another press conference for an hour from now; in the great mosque of Al Aksa on the Temple Mount, the faithful had already begun offering thanks to Allah for the release of the imprisoned Palestinian warriors.

  Outside the Jaffa Gate, a large bus crawled up the ramp and into the Old City. In the bus window, a cardboard sign read, in English: “Maccabean Friars of the Holy Order of the True Cross.” Hardly anyone paid attention as the bus pulled to a stop in front of the steps leading to David’s Tower. Priests and friars and monks of every religious order were a common sight in the streets of the Old City. With a hiss, the doors of the bus swung open and forty-seven friars—all dressed in identical coarse brown robes tied with rope belts, the hoods drawn low over their heads, their heads bowed, their hands folded across their chests—filed off. Walking in twos, they started down Latin Patriarchate Road. The hems of their robes dusted the ground, concealing the fact that the friars were all wearing black Reebok sneakers. The occasional clank of metal drew a sharp look from one of the friars at the head of the column. Several Christian Arabs, locking up their shops for the night, stepped back and crossed themselves as the procession filed past. One pious old woman bowed from the waist to the lead friar, who bowed back to her. At Saint Peter Road, the procession jigged right and then left again through the now deserted streets, coming upon the Casa Nova Hospice from the rear.

  As the friars filed past the little used back door of the Hospice, eight figures detached themselves and ducked inside. The others continued on through an alleyway that ran along the side of the Hospice to Casa Nova Road. The friars sank to their knees, as if in prayer, at the foot of the hospice wall, all but vanishing in the murky shadow at the side of the building. The friar at the head of the procession surveyed the road, then pumped his arm once. Instantly six of the friars dashed across and disappeared into the side streets on the other side. In three minutes, the last of the friars had sprinted across the road and started into the maze of alleyways and passageways that cut through the neighborhood, at the heart of which was an abandoned bathhouse.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  AN THE DARKENED WAR ROOM OFF THE PRIME MINISTER’S office, Zalman Cohen paced back and forth in front of the bank of telephones, fanning his puffy face with a sheaf of papers. Elihu stood motionless in front of a window staring at his reflection without seeing it. He envied Baruch, who was younger and fitter and had talked his way onto the raid as a representative of the inter-agency Working Group. Waiting, for the katsa, was sheer agony; it was psychologically easier to be on a raiding party than in a command center dreading each ring of the telephone. The chief of the general staff, a barrel-chested general with a crimson beret jammed under an epaulet, growled orders into a satellite phone fitted with a scrambler; troops were being deployed in anticipation of Arab protests if and when the so-called mujaddid was shot to death by Israeli soldiers. The Shin Bet people, along with the Minister of Defense and two other members of the inner cabinet, helped themselves to fruit juice at a sideboard and talked in undertones. The Prime Minister, the only tranquil person in the room thanks to his legendary self control, sat alone at the oval conference table smoking one of the rare cigarettes he permitted himself. Every now and then he would grip it between his thumb and three fingers, a habit he had picked up from a Polish uncle, and pluck it from his mouth to watch the end burn down, as if there was a message waiting to be deciphered in the glow of the embers. On the blotter in front of him were the two versions of the communiqué that Cohen had prepared for the eight o’clock press conference. Both versions started out by explaining that the release of the Palestinian prisoners had been announced to give the General Staff commando unit time to raid the hideaway where Abu Bakr was believed to be holding Rabbi Apfulbaum; that all the prisoners demanded by the hostage takers were still in Israeli custody, where they would remain for the foreseeable future. The first version of the communiqué went on to disclose that the raiders had succeeded in freeing the Rabbi. The second version announced that Apfulbaum had been killed by his abductors before the Israeli soldiers could reach him. Both versions ended with a solemn declaration of the government’s intention to never give in to terrorist blackmail. “There is no rear area in the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism,” Cohen had the Prime Minister saying. “There are no non-combatants. All of our citizens—the private patrolling West Bank roads, the mother crossing Jerusalem on a number eighteen bus, the Rabbi returning from Yad Mordechai—are on the front lines.”

  A red telephone on the table purred. The men drinking fruit juice around the sideboard broke off their conversations and wheeled toward the sound. The katsa took two steps in Cohen’s direction as the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee reached out and snatched the phone off its hook.

  “Cohen,” he mumbled. He listened, nodded once, nodded a second time and dropped the phone back on its cradle. “They’re inside the Old City,” he announced. “Operation Simon Bar-Kokhba is underway.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  KNEELING ON THE FLOOR, AZZIZ AND AOWN HOVERED OVER THE backgammon set, flinging the dice out of small leather cups, bleating like sheep as they slapped the plastic pieces down on the board. At the field radio, Petra toyed with a dial, tuning in the voice of an Israeli officer broadcasting from a command car leading the convoy up the coast road north of Acre. She plugged in a headset and handed it to Doctor al-Shaath. He pressed one of the earphones to an ear and listened intently. “They’re passing the Misrafot Junction,” he announced, “five kilometers south of the Lebanese border and ten kilometers south of the United Nations post in the Lebanese town of Nakura. What time do you have?”

  “Seven twenty-five.”

  “Another twenty minutes and the prisoners should be free.”

  At the table, the Rabbi slurped his second glass of sweetened tea. Some of the liquid trickled from the corner of his mouth into the stubble on his chin, but he
didn’t appear to notice. Sweeney took a quick look at the front door of the hideaway—both steel bars had been driven home, bolting the steel-plated door shut. He stretched his lanky body and got up and came around the table and squatted down next to Apfulbaum.

  “Rabbi.”

  Smacking his lips gleefully, Apfulbaum closed one eye and scrutinized the blurred figure of Sweeney with the other. “Well, if it isn’t the goy journalist with the chip on his shoulder! I was, believe it or not, planning to make a formal statement about my incarceration. Do you have a pencil? Are you all ears?” Apfulbaum giggled into his glass of tea. “Be careful to spell my name correctly—it’s I. Apfulbaum, with an f after the p—and quote me accurately, that way my solid arguments will resist your efforts to liquefy them.”

  Sweeney threw a quick glance over his shoulder. The Doctor was still glued to the earphone. On the floor, Azziz knocked off one of Aown’s pieces. His brother chopped the air with an open palm in exasperation. “Rabbi,” Sweeney whispered, gripping Apfulbaum’s arm, “there’s something extremely import—”

  “I don’t deny I said Torah Judaism and Koranic Islamism are Allah-oriented, but I want to explicate, I want to put it in context. Up to now I’ve been too busy studying Torah to go to a dentist, which is why I had difficulty sinking my teeth into the Koran.”

  Sweeney tightened his grip on the Rabbi’s arm. “The Israelis know where you are—”

  “I am absolutely convinced the creation in 1948 of the Garden of Eden, underneath which rivers are thought to flow, was a religious event. Are you copying this down word for word, Sweeney? Get a single comma wrong and your name will be forever engraved on my feces list. Gehenna will freeze over before I give you another interview. Here’s the deal: I would shoot my enemies instead of my friends if I had a weapon smart enough to distinguish between the two.”