by Paul Sussman
'Over the last three years members of Chayalei David have poisoned Palestinian wells, destroyed Palestinian irrigation equipment, cut down Palestinian orchards. Three separate members of your organization have been jailed for the murder of Palestinian civilians, including one case in which an eleven-year-old boy was beaten to death with a pick-axe handle. You yourself have spoken with approval of the actions of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir. Are you really not just an Israeli al-Mulatham, Mr Har-Zion?'
Har-Zion froze, then turned slowly back towards the press-pack, searching for Layla's face, finding her eyes, holding them. His stare was hard, angry, although there was something flickering behind it, amusement almost, as if the two of them were playing some private game to which only they were privy.
'Explain to me, Miss al-Madani' – he spat her name, as if it tasted bitter in his mouth – 'why is it that when an Arab kills twenty civilians he is called a victim, but when a Jew defends himself and his family he is condemned as a murderer?'
Layla held his stare, refusing to be intimidated.
'So you support the unprovoked murder of Palestinian civilians?'
'I support the right of my people to live in peace and security on the land that was given to them by God.'
'Even if that involves systematic acts of terrorism?'
Har-Zion's face crumpled into a scowl. The rest of the pack were staring at them, silent suddenly, absorbed in the private duel.
'There is only one group of terrorists in this region,' he said, 'and it is not the Jews. Although you would not guess that from your reporting.'
'You don't call the murder of a child terrorism?'
'I call it a tragedy of war, Miss al-Madani. But it was not us who started the war.'
He paused a moment, eyes boring into her.
'Although it will certainly be us who finish it.'
He held her gaze, then turned on his heel and stepped back into the house.
'Bitch,' hissed one of his followers as he came in. 'She needs a bullet through her head.'
Har-Zion smiled. 'Maybe. But not just yet. Even she has her uses.'
LUXOR
Khalifa loved the ruins of Karnak Temple, especially at the end of the day, when the crowds had thinned and the setting sun suffused the entire complex with a hazy golden radiance. Iput-Isut the ancients used to call it, 'the most esteemed of places', and he could understand why, for there was indeed something magical about it, a ruined city suspended midway between earth and the heavens. Being there invariably took him out of himself, soothed and calmed him, as if he had been transported to some different dimension of time and space, leaving all his troubles behind.
Not today, though. Today, the monumental statues and hieroglyph-covered walls left him cold. Indeed he barely noticed them, so lost was he in his own thoughts, striding through the first and second pylons and into the column-forest of the great Hypostyle Hall with barely a glance at his surroundings.
It was almost five p.m. He had, on Chief Hassani's orders, wasted most of the afternoon at the Winter Palace dealing with an elderly English tourist who had reported her jewellery stolen. He and Sariya had spent three hours interviewing the entire housekeeping staff before the woman had finally remembered she hadn't brought the jewellery with her in the first place. 'My daughter told me to leave it at home,' she'd explained, 'in case it got stolen. You know, in Arab countries . . .'
Having sorted that out he had returned to the station where he had sat alone at his desk, chainsmoking, doodling on his pad, thinking about Piet Jansen and Hannah Schlegel and the meeting with Chief Hassani, going over and over the whole thing in his head. After an hour he had got up and gone down into the records room in the basement to pull out the notes on the Schlegel case, knowing he should just leave it, but unable to stop himself. Here, however, another mystery had greeted him, for the notes were nowhere to be found. Miss Zafouli, the elderly spinster who, for as long as Khalifa could remember – as long as anyone could remember – had been the guardian of the station's past cases, had searched high and low for them, but without success. The file had disappeared.
'I can't explain it,' she had muttered. 'I just can't explain it.'
He had left the basement more uneasy than ever and, without really thinking about it, hopped a service taxi down to Karnak, not so much to clear his mind as because it was the place where Hannah Schlegel had been murdered and therefore, somehow, the focal point of all his doubts and worries.
He passed now through the great Hypostyle Hall, its papyrus-shaped columns towering above him like sequoia trunks, and exited through a doorway in the southern wall. It was near closing time, and the tourist police were starting to herd visitors back towards the main entrance. One approached Khalifa, wagging his finger, but the detective flashed his ID and was allowed to continue.
Why had Hassani been so adamant he shouldn't go back into the Schlegel case? That was the question he couldn't get out of his mind. Why had the chief seemed so nervous? There was something wrong here. Badly wrong. And trying to find out what was going to bring him trouble. A lot of trouble. But still he couldn't drop it.
'Dammit,' he muttered, grinding one Cleopatra out beneath the sole of his shoe and immediately lighting another one. 'Bloody dammit.'
He angled towards the south-east corner of the temple enclosure, following a path between rows of hieroglyph-covered sandstone blocks, like the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, before eventually coming to a long, rectangular building set slightly apart from the rest of the complex. The Precinct of Khonsu. He slowed momentarily, taking in the monumental walls of weathered sandstone, then, his heart pounding suddenly, slipped through a side door into the interior.
It was cool and shady inside, very silent, very still, with a solitary shaft of sunlight spearing across the paved floor from a doorway opposite, like a stream of molten gold. To his left a pillared forecourt opened out; to his right was another open court, and beyond it a low doorway leading into the temple's main shrine. He himself was standing in a narrow hypostyle hall spanning the centre of the building, with eight papyrus-shaped columns marching away in front of him, four on either side. It was beneath the third column on the left that Hannah Schlegel's body had been found.
He allowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom, then moved forward. Although he had visited Karnak numerous times in the intervening years, he had always studiously avoided this particular part of it, and as he crossed the hall now he half expected to find spatters of sticky red blood still marking the paving slabs, a body-shaped chalk outline. There was nothing to suggest that violence had once been done here, however; no bloodstains, no chalk, no memory whatsoever, unless it was in the stones themselves, which seemed to possess a sort of elemental awareness, a knowing impassivity. 'We have witnessed many things,' they seemed to say, 'both good and bad. But of them we will not speak.'
He reached the relevant column and squatted, recalling the moment he had first seen the dead woman's corpse. For some reason the overall state of the body had affected him less than the extraneous details: the victim's green underpants, visible where her skirt had rucked up above her waist; a line of ants marching across her shoeless right foot; a jagged scar meandering across her abdomen like a pencil-line scrawled by a drunk; above all, the strange tattoo on her left forearm, a triangle followed by five numbers, in faded blue-black ink, like veins seeping their way through cheese. A Jewish thing, Chief Mahfouz had explained. Some religious sign or something. Like the marks you get on meat to show where it's come from. The analogy had shocked Khalifa, as though the victim was just some anonymous carcass lying on a butcher's slab. Like the marks you get on meat. Horrible.
He scuffed his hand across the floor, his palm making a dry hissing sound on the dusty sandstone, then stood again, raising his eyes to the wall behind the column, on which was inscribed an ancient relief depicting the pharaoh Ramesses XI being purified by the gods Horus and Thoth, the latter depicted with a human body surmounted by the head of an
ibis.
Thoth and tzfardeah, that's what Schlegel had said just before she died. Tzfardeah, he felt certain, was a reference to Jansen's deformed feet. But what about Thoth? Had she simply, in her dying delirium, been stating what she could see above her? Thoth the Ibis, the last image upon which her eyes had focused. Or had there been some deeper meaning, some more revealing resonance?
He took a drag on his cigarette and rubbed his temples, digging into his mind, pulling out everything he could remember about the god. Wisdom, writing, counting and medicine – these were Thoth's particular preserves. Magic also, for it was he, according to Egyptian mythology, who had provided the spells that enabled the goddess Isis to bring her murdered husband/brother Osiris back to life. What else? He was the gods' scribe and messenger, the creator of hieroglyphs, the author of Egypt's sacred laws, the recorder of the eternal verdict on a deceased person's heart. He was closely associated with the moon – he was often depicted with a lunar disc over his head – and had his chief cult centre at Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, where he was known, among other things, as 'The Heart of Ra', 'The Measurer of Time' and 'Master of the Words of God'. His silver barque transported the souls of the dead across the night sky. He was married to Seshat, the 'Lady of Books', the gods' librarian.
There were plenty of possible connections in all of this, plenty of ways for Khalifa to bend Schlegel's mention of Thoth into a coded accusation against Piet Jansen. Jansen was intelligent and well read, after all; he spoke many languages, he had a large library of books. If the ancient Egyptians had had any interest in archaeology, Thoth would almost certainly have been its patron deity.
Yet despite these similarities, Khalifa still had the sense that he was missing something; that he had still not got to the heart of what Schlegel had been trying to convey. She had meant something specific, and he wasn't getting it. He just wasn't getting it.
He finished his Cleopatra and stamped the butt out beneath his shoe. Maybe Hassani's right, he thought to himself. Maybe I am just imagining things, trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. And even if I'm not, what can I do about it? Carry on an investigation behind the chief's back, risk my entire career? And for what? When all was said and done, after all, Schlegel was only an old—
A sound of footsteps echoed at the far end of the temple. At first he thought it must be a guard. As the steps came closer, he realized they were too soft for a man. Five seconds passed, ten, then a woman in a djellaba suda entered the hall from its southern end, a bunch of wild flowers clutched in her hand, a black shawl draped over her head so that her face was all but hidden. The sun was gone now, and in the thickening twilight she didn't notice Khalifa, who had backed away into the shadows behind a pillar. She came up to the spot where Hannah Schlegel had died and, throwing off the shawl, squatted and laid the flowers on the floor. Khalifa stepped forward.
'Hello, Nur.'
She spun round, startled.
'Please, don't be afraid,' he said, holding up a hand to indicate that he meant her no harm. 'I didn't mean to scare you.'
She came to her feet, backing away, gazing at him suspiciously. A grimace of recognition slowly puckered her mouth.
'Khalifa,' she whispered. There was a brief pause, then: 'The man who killed my husband. One of the men.'
She had changed since he had last seen her, in the courtroom on the day of Mohammed Gemal's conviction. Then she had been young and pretty. Now she was a different person, worn, tired-looking, her face weathered like ancient wood.
'Why were you watching me?' she asked.
'I wasn't watching you. I was just . . .'
He broke off, unable to explain exactly why he had come to the temple. She stared at him, then, lowering her eyes, returned to the flowers, squatting and arranging them around the base of the column. A white egret appeared outside in the forecourt, pecking at the dust.
'I come here every now and then,' she said after a while, talking more to herself than to Khalifa, tweaking at the flower stems with her wrinkled fingers. 'Mohammed doesn't have a proper grave. They just dumped him in a pit outside the prison. It's too far for me to go all the way up to Cairo. So I come here. I don't know why. I suppose it's . . . well, the place where he died, in a way.'
Her tone was matter-of-fact, not overtly accusing, which somehow made it even worse for Khalifa. He shifted uncomfortably, fiddling with a coin in his pocket.
'I leave them for the old woman as well,' she continued. 'It wasn't her fault, was it? She didn't accuse Mohammed.'
She got the flowers laid out to her satisfaction and stood again, ready to leave. Khalifa took another step towards her.
'The children?' he asked, anxious, suddenly, that the conversation shouldn't end.
She shrugged. 'Mansour's got a job as a mechanic. Abdul's just finishing school. Fatma's married, with a kid on the way. She lives up in Armant now. Her husband works in the cane factory.'
'And you. Have you—'
'Remarried?' She looked up at him through dull eyes. 'Mohammed's my husband. He might not have been a good man, but he's still my husband.'
The white egret had pecked its way up to the doorway and now came stalking into the hall, its head jerking this way and that, its knitting-needle legs rising and falling with the controlled, rhythmic delicacy of a ballet dancer. It came to within a metre of the woman, then moved off again.
'He didn't do it, you know,' she said quietly. 'He took the watch, which was bad. Very bad. But he didn't kill the old woman. And he didn't take the wallet. Not the wallet.'
Khalifa was staring at the floor.
'I know,' he mumbled. 'I'm . . . sorry.'
She followed the egret with her eyes, tracking it as it weaved its way through the pillars.
'You were the only good one,' she whispered. 'The only one I thought might help him. But then you . . .'
She sighed and turned to leave, moving a couple of steps before turning back again.
'The money's helped. It can't bring him back, but it's helped. So thank you for that.'
Khalifa looked up, confused.
'I don't . . . what money?'
'The money you've been sending. I know it's you. You were the only good one.'
'I haven't . . . what money? I don't know what you're talking about.'
She was gazing over his shoulder into the webs of shadow thickening at the back of the hall, her eyes dry and empty – the eyes of someone from whom all hope has been drained.
'Every year. Just before Eid el-Adha. It comes in the post. No note, no name, nothing. Just three thousand Egyptian pounds, in hundred notes. Always in hundred notes. It started a week after Mohammed killed himself, and has carried on ever since. Every year. It's how I got the kids through school, how I managed to survive. I know it's you. You are a good man, despite it all.'
She looked across at him, then turned and hurried out of the temple.
JERUSALEM
On the way home from the Old City Layla stopped into the Jerusalem Hotel for a drink and a bite to eat with her friend Nuha.
A handsome, Ottoman-style building near the lower end of the Nablus Road, Palestinian-owned and run, with a cool, stone-floored interior and vine-covered front terrace, the hotel had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. It was here that she had met Nizar Suleiman, the editor of al-Ayyam, who had given her her first writing job; here that she had picked up some of her best story leads; here that she had lost her virginity (aged nineteen, to a chain-smoking French journalist, an uneasy, fumbled affair that had left her feeling soiled and confused). And, of course, it was at the Jerusalem Hotel that her parents had first met, and, if her mother was to be believed, Layla herself had been conceived.
'There was a terrible storm that night,' her mother had later told her. 'Thunder, lightning, rain like you've never seen. The whole world seemed to be tearing itself apart. I sometimes think that's why you're like you are.'
'Like what, Mum?'
Her mother had smiled, but
said no more.
They had been an unlikely couple, her parents, the fun-loving English girl from a resolutely middle-class Cambridgeshire family and the intense, introverted doctor ten years her senior whose every waking hour was dedicated to the care and well-being of his fellow Palestinians.
They had met in 1972, at a gathering to celebrate the marriage of a mutual friend. Alexandra Bale, as Layla's mother was then known, had just left university and was working as a volunteer teacher in an East Jerusalem girls' school, uncertain about what she wanted to do with her life. Mohammed Faisal al-Madani lived in the Gaza Strip where he ran a medical clinic in the Jabaliya refugee camp, working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, ministering to the camp's population.
'It was his eyes that hooked me,' Layla's mother later recalled. 'They were so dark, so sad. Like looking into a well of black water.'
Despite, or possibly because of, their wildly differing backgrounds, they had clicked instantly, Layla's father swept away by the young woman's beauty and wit, her mother hypnotized by the elder man's intensity, his quiet, brooding strength. They had started going out almost immediately and, much to the horror of Alexandra's parents, married six months later, enjoying a one-night honeymoon in the Jerusalem Hotel before setting up home in the cramped rabbit warren of Gaza City. Layla was born on 6 October 1973, the day the Ramadan war broke out.