Birthright

by Alan Gold

  “Father, look at that,” Jonathan said, pointing to three men who were amusing the crowds by eating fire. “How can they do that without being burned?” he asked in amazement, wandering closer to the semicircle of the audience, some of whom were throwing coins onto a blanket spread out in front of the fire-eaters.

  Abram smiled and held his son back. “We haven’t got time to look at such wonders, my son. There’s so much to see in Alexandria, and we must find lodgings before night falls and the curfew is rung out.”

  “How do they do what they’re doing without being burned? They’re smiling, not screaming in pain.”

  Abram looked carefully and saw that the men blew some liquid out of their mouths onto the flaming torch, which then burst into flames, making it look as though they were eating the fire.

  He smiled and whispered, “They put something like oil or a strong drink into their mouths and then spit it out, which causes the firebrand to flare. It’s a trick, Jonathan. And a good lesson. Never accept things for what they seem, only for what they actually are. Now, my son, pick up our bags and we’ll find somewhere to sleep tonight.”

  As they walked away from the ship that had been their home for the past four nights, taking them from the port of Joppa in Syria Palaestina to Alexandria, they didn’t know that they were being observed. She was a tall woman, her head and much of her face obscured by a black scarf, her body encased in black robes. The garb enabled her to become invisible in the shadows of the dock, allowing her to see who walked off the boats. Most were sailors or merchants, but some were travelers. Many were too old for her, but some were young men, and they were of great interest.

  The youth who’d just walked off the boat from Palestine with the older man was of particular interest. So she followed them, walking in the shadows of the darkening night, waiting to see where they went.

  • • •

  Though they had been in the city for several days, Abram was a worried man. Day was becoming night, and he feared that his son, whom he’d sent on a mission, had become disoriented.

  The doctor looked out the window at the position of the sun and realized that it was approaching dusk. Jonathan had left their lodgings just after the noontime meal; he had been ordered by his father to go out to buy some bread, olives, peppers, and a roasted haunch of sheep from one of the many butchers in Alexandria so they could enjoy their dinner. He was instructed to come straight back. Since midday, Abram had been entertaining Maria the Jewess, the most famous alchemist in Alexandria—perhaps in the whole world—and they had been engrossed in the myriad of things that people of science and knowledge talked about.

  His introduction to Maria had come through a merchant he’d treated for fever when the man was passing through Jerusalem on his way to Babylon. So impressed had he been with the treatment that Abram had prescribed, and the modest cost compared to that of his doctors in Alexandria, that he had written to Abram and kept in touch. It was the merchant who had suggested a meeting with Maria the Jewess and alchemist, and on the basis of the messages he’d received, Abram’s wife, Ruth, had suggested that she, Abram, and their young son travel to the Egyptian coastal city to meet with Maria and learn from her. But then Ruth had died of fevers.

  But at the end of the previous year, he realized that he’d grown distant from Jonathan, and the lad was sensitive enough to feel the detachment. So Abram determined that as there were only two of them left, he would fulfill Ruth’s wishes, and for the past four hours, he and Maria had been engrossed in discussions concerning alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into gold, the nature and reality of the Philosopher’s Stone, and the ideas espoused by Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras. When he’d told her that in his younger days he’d become a Christian follower of a self-proclaimed messiah called Jesus who came from Nazareth in Israel, she nearly jumped out of her seat in excitement. She told him that although she was a Jewess, she was a student of the words of this very same Jesus, stories now being preached by bishops who lived and proselytized in Alexandria.

  “One night,” she told him, “when I was asleep, this very Jesus came to me and took me to the top of a mountain. I wasn’t afraid, because he held me and I felt secure. His skin was as black as pitch, like that of an Abyssinian. From the top of the mountain, I could see the entire world spread out before me. In the distance, I could see the Greek philosophers arguing in their academy. Then this very Jesus lay me down and his essence entered my body. I grew very frightened, but he said to me, “Why are you afraid, oh ye of little faith; if I have shown you earthly things and you did not trust me, how then will you believe the heavenly things which I will show you?” Then I returned and woke in the morning. I told this to the bishops, but they cursed me, telling me that I was spreading heresy. They forbade me from entering their prayer rooms.”

  “For me, and for my son, Jonathan, we are more suited to the faith of Moses and Aaron, of David and Solomon.”

  But the moment he mentioned his son’s name, for the first time all afternoon, Abram realized that he’d been so absorbed by the conversation that the sun was about to set into the western sea, and Jonathan wasn’t home. Maria noticed the look of concern on his face and asked why he was worried.

  “He is a young man. He doesn’t know Alexandria. Many people pass through here, strangers and sailors, merchants and slave traders. I shouldn’t have sent him out on his own. I should have gone with him.”

  “He will come to no harm,” said Maria. “He will return soon. He’s probably met a pretty girl in the marketplace and lost all sense of the time.”

  But Jonathan wasn’t talking to a girl; nor was he in the marketplace. Since he and his father had arrived some days earlier by boat, they had been carefully watched by a woman in a dark robe, her head covered in a cowl whenever she was outdoors.

  The woman, Didia, was a slave trader who purchased Nubian, Abyssinian, Libyan, and Berber boys and girls sold to her by their parents or merchants; she trained them and then sent them off to Greece and Rome to work as servants or prostitutes.

  Her captivation with Jonathan began the moment she saw him. It was when he walked from the boat, to the time they purchased room and board in a lodging house near the dock, to this sudden meeting with Maria the Jewess. Not that she was interested in an alchemist, nor in Maria’s fame for heating things in a bath of hot water, but because she was monopolizing Abram the doctor. And because the alchemist and the doctor were ensconced in his room all afternoon, he had unwisely allowed his beautiful son, Jonathan, to wander Alexandria alone.

  And being a young lad alone in a strange land, he’d left the main merchant streets and was wandering along alleyways to see what sorts of houses and public buildings were in the city. Jonathan’s curiosity enabled Didia to do what she most wanted. It was only through the intervention of the gods of Egypt that she had spotted him. Had she not been sending her latest batch of slaves off to the Roman port of Ostia, she wouldn’t have been on the dock and wouldn’t have seen Jonathan walking alongside his father.

  At first she couldn’t believe it. She looked and felt her legs turn to water. But on closer scrutiny, even though she kept to the shadows, the resemblance to her own dead son was even more remarkable. His hair, the shape of his face, his broad shoulders, even the way the young lad walked, striding in footsteps that seemed too large for his body, was identical to that of Didia’s beautiful son, Kheti. She barely kept up as they walked from the dock into the town. She felt as though a brilliant beam of light had descended from the heavens. Seeing Jonathan brought her beloved son back to life. Over the year he had taken to die, Didia had seen her beautiful son wither away, coughing, weak, and shrunken, incongruous compared to the glowing son she had loved with all her heart. She’d known of the wasting disease in many slaves from the poorer lands south of Egypt but had never thought that her beloved son would become a victim.

  As Jonathan walked, she saw not Abram’s son but her own beautiful boy. And for the first time since he’d died, s
he felt her heart beat in excitement. Now he was hers. She sat in her home and looked at him closely. The resemblance was nothing short of remarkable. His hair was slightly darker, and his nose was more Roman than Egyptian, but aside from those differences, they could have been brothers. On her orders, Didia’s slave had thrown a sack over the boy as he walked into an alley, bound him with rope, and brought him struggling and shouting to Didia’s home.

  “You’re wondering why you’re here, aren’t you, boy?” she said.

  His mouth was full of cloth, and a bandage was tied tightly around it to stop him from shouting; he was bound hand and foot and couldn’t move. But he could nod.

  “You are very valuable to me in ways that you could not even begin to understand. If you promise to remain quiet, I will remove the bindings around your mouth and give you food and drink. Do you promise not to shout? Not that it matters, but be assured that it won’t help you, because nobody can hear, and if they could, this is the house of slavery, so people of your age shout and scream and beg all the while. But I don’t want you to shout. My son, Kheti, never used to shout. So, will you promise?”

  Jonathan looked at the woman. She’d removed her cowl, and he could see her graying hair and her face, lined with worry. She was much older than Ruth before she’d died, but there was a resemblance. The shape of her face, her arched eyebrows, the way her mouth turned up when she smiled.

  It was Ruth’s smile that had always given him such pleasure when he entered the house. A warm and loving smile, until she became ill. But this woman was not his mother, and he was frightened of her. Still, he was desperate for a drink and hungry, so he nodded.

  Didia nodded curtly, and her slave removed the bandage from Jonathan’s mouth and pulled out the rag. He licked his dry lips.

  “So, boy, what’s your name?”

  His voice was hoarse, but he tried to sound confident. “Jonathan.”

  She nodded. “From now on, you will forget what your mother and father called you. From now on, in my house, you will honor a different name. I will call you Kheti.”

  • • •

  Abram and Maria the Jewess searched every street near his lodgings. But when it was pitch-black, with only a few streetlights to pierce the darkness of the moonless night, they met again in the doorway of a baker’s shop.

  “Nothing,” said Maria.

  Abram nodded. “I’ll pray to the Almighty God that he’s safe and unharmed; that he’s met with some other lads and is with them; that he’s drinking and has fallen asleep. I will pray, because without prayer, I am nothing.”

  Maria shook her head. “You can pray, Abram, but I have an evil feeling in my bones that prayer won’t help you. I’ve seen your boy. He’s tall and beautiful. And in Alexandria, we have dozens of men and women who trade in the lives of slaves. Alexandria is well known as an unsafe port for boys and girls.”

  Abram looked at her in horror. “A slave?”

  “You must face that reality, Abram.”

  “My son . . . my Jonathan? No!”

  “These are evil times, my friend. And Alexandria is an evil place.”

  “But this is the most enlightened city in the world. Your library, your schools of philosophers, your . . . How can you allow the evils of slavery, the barbarism of—” He couldn’t continue.

  Maria looked at his disconsolate face in pity. “Alchemy teaches that the three emanations of sentient beings—intellectual, celestial, and corruptible—form a fourth, which is the one machine of the whole world. But the ancients tell us that it is also necessary to have the corruptible to form a fifth essence, the quintessence, in order to have unity. We need evil, like these slave traders, in order to have the quintessence of life. I’m so sorry, my friend.”

  “I’ll go to the authorities,” he said. “The Roman procurator and governor of Alexandria. I’ll demand that they and their soldiers tear apart every slaver’s place of business until my lovely son is returned safe and well.”

  She shook her head. “Much of the money that runs Alexandria, and which goes into the pockets of the procurator, comes from trade. And the slave trade is one of the sources of this city’s wealth. They will laugh at you, Abram. They will tell you that you never should have allowed your Jonathan to wander the streets of the city alone.”

  Terrified, he asked, “What can I do?”

  “Together, we will visit the homes of the major traders. You will offer to buy your son back. Whatever happens, don’t tell them he’s your son, or their price will double. Don’t show them fear or sadness or anger, because these people can smell a person’s innermost thoughts, and they will know a desperate father when they see one.”

  Abram nodded. “Where shall we start?”

  Maria thought for a moment. “We’ll begin with the slave trader Khnumbaf,” she said. “If he doesn’t have your son, we’ll visit Bocchoris. And then Didia. After her, we’ll go to Shebitku. These are the biggest traders in boys and girls, and the most likely to have men watching the ports for lads like your son. Remember, you’re not a father searching for his son. You’re my husband, and we want to buy a slave to clean our home.”

  A valley northwest of Jerusalem

  1947

  THE SCENT OF pine was in the air. Or was it cedar? Perhaps it was a wild olive tree or a sycamore sending out its fragrance to attract pollinating bees or butterflies. Or maybe it was one of the millions of eucalyptus imported from Australia and planted in order to drain the swamps and transform them from malarial death traps into arable farming land.

  Whatever it was, in the buoyant air of a Palestine awakening to the warmth of what everybody hoped would be a mild and fruitful spring, it was a refreshing perfume. It was a scent that enlivened Shalman’s senses as he trudged over the mountains on the outskirts of Jerusalem before plunging into one of the many deep valleys that dissected the landscape.

  He was alone, wandering the ancient time-trodden pathways that crisscrossed the mountains, following thin dusty tracks etched over the millennia into the barren earth by generations of shepherds tending to flocks of goats and sheep. Shalman looked at the landscape carefully, this time not with the eyes of a freedom fighter but with the eyes of a participant in the history of the land.

  Though he still loved Judit with all his heart, Shalman was working to ensure the family’s future. He would become a professional archaeologist, and when the coming war with Britain or the Arabs was over, now that the universities had became proper institutions of learning, he’d qualify and earn a good living, especially as he now had interesting contacts in the American media. This meant, though, that he had to leave Judit and Vered to be on his own, to wander the landscape and engage in archaeological digs.

  Leaving Judit with Vered was also important, in part to enforce the responsibilities of motherhood on his wife, but also it enabled him to journey out into the ancient hills and valleys that were the landscape of the Bible, of his people’s history. In no other nation in the world was a document of theology used as a guidepost to a country’s history. Yet while most Jews who came to Palestine arrived with little or no religious belief, every child who went to school was taught the Bible as lessons in Israel’s culture, geography, history, and society. And the more Shalman learned about and practiced archaeology, the more the accuracy of the way the ancients wrote about the events in the Bible proved true.

  For a hundred years, scientists, archaeologists, and adventurers had been scouring the land of the Ottomans and, more lately, the land of Palestine, using the Bible as a tour guide to history. More and more archaeological digs had uncovered what the ancient scribes of David and Solomon, Elijah and Ezra had written thousands of years earlier in stone and priceless artifacts.

  Shalman’s forays into the biblical landscape were both an enlightenment and an escape. They were also the realization of something latent within him. Shalman had spent so long steeping himself in the history of this land and yet feeling removed from it that he believed it was time he put his
hands in the earth and into his history.

  He was one of hundreds of students who had enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem since World War II had come to an end. He joined the many young men and women who wanted to further their education despite the growing tensions with the Arabs and the British. Instead of studying agriculture, politics, or science, as might have been expected by those seeking a career in a growing nation, Shalman had decided to further his love of the ancient world.

  Resting after the climb up the mountain, he sat on a rock and surveyed the landscape. It gave him time to catch his breath and ponder the future. Britain had recently announced that it would hand back its mandate over Palestine, allowing the fledgling United Nations to determine the land’s future. This had been read by Lehi as a reason to intensify attacks on the British and Arabs alike. The logic expressed by the Lehi leadership was that if the countries that were going to vote in the United Nations saw the region as a powder keg of violence, nobody would want to take up the mandate that Britain wanted to relinquish.

  They’ll vote for our independence, split the country between Arabs and Jews, and leave us alone, Yellin-Mor told a gathering, his calm voice carrying a weight of rationality that galvanized his fighters. But for Shalman, the logic felt increasingly flawed. All he could feel was despair because of a coming war, which was seeming more and more inevitable as the sides grew further apart.