The Last Secret Of The Temple

by Paul Sussman

  He worked the almond-white liquid into his shoulders, chest and stomach, moving down towards his penis and testicles, a tight, bunched fruit dangling from the shelf of shiny scar tissue that was his groin. 'Do you have children?' the doctors had asked him. When he had said no they had shaken their heads sadly. No chance now. Everything inside had been ruined. He was empty. Incapable of bringing forth life. It wasn't just his brother they'd killed, but his children too. His future. The future he and his wife Miriam had so often dreamt of.

  Benjamin, his children, his flesh, and three years ago Miriam too, from cancer – all had been taken from him, stripped away like bark from a tree, leaving nothing but his faith, his fury and his country. Israel. That was his family now. And, also, his revenge. His cry of defiance against the Arabs and the goyim and the Jew-haters everywhere. And he would do whatever he had to do to ensure its survival.

  He finished massaging himself and, laying aside the balm bottle, stared into the mirror. You might be scarred, he thought, but still you are strong. We might be scarred, but still we are strong. Va'avarecha me'-varakhecha umekalelecha. I will bless those who bless you, and he who curses you I will curse.

  He nodded and, turning away, started dressing again.

  JERUSALEM

  There were so many 'if onlys' that might have saved her father's life: if only they hadn't driven up to Jerusalem for her fifteenth birthday; if only they had come back earlier; if only they hadn't diverted into the camp; if only the Israeli soldier had been dumped somewhere else. Above all, if only her father hadn't been such a good man. That, ultimately, is what had killed him, as surely as the blows of the baseball bat – that he cared for other people, that he was a human being who couldn't help but help. A lesser person would have turned away and lived. But her father was not a lesser person, and for that he'd been butchered.

  They had found the soldier on a roadside on the outskirts of Jabaliya refugee camp, late at night. They were on their way back from her birthday lunch at the Jerusalem Hotel, and had diverted off the main Erez Checkpoint–Gaza City road in order to collect something from her father's surgery in the centre of the camp. Their headlights had picked up a shape in the darkness and, slowing, they discovered it was a young man, half-naked and unconscious, his face so badly beaten it was barely recognizable as something human. Her father stopped, got out and went over to him.

  'Is he alive?' her mother had asked.

  Her father had nodded.

  'Israeli?'

  Another nod.

  'Christ.'

  The First Intifada was then at its height, and anti-Israeli feeling was intense, especially in the pressure cooker of the Gaza Strip, where the revolt had first erupted the previous December. How and when the soldier had ended up on the roadside was uncertain. What was clear was that to help him at this time, in this place, would be extremely dangerous. Palestinians who aided Israelis were hated as much as the Israelis themselves. More, even.

  'Leave him,' Layla had said. 'The Jews don't care about us. Why should we do anything for them?'

  Her father shook his head. 'I am a doctor, Layla. I can't leave someone to die in the dust like a dog. Whoever they might be.'

  And so they lifted the soldier into their car and drove him to the surgery, where her father had done his best to clean the man's wounds and bandage him. He regained consciousness as he was being treated and started to buck and weep.

  'Please hold his hand, Layla,' her father ordered her. 'Try to reassure him.'

  She did as she was instructed. It was the first time she had ever touched an Israeli.

  Afterwards, when they'd patched him up as best they could, they wrapped the soldier in a blanket, got him back into the car and drove out of the camp, intending to drop him off at one of the Israeli checkpoints that bottlenecked the main highway. They had barely gone a hundred metres when, sicken-ingly, two cars appeared out of nowhere and came up alongside them, forcing them over to the edge of the road.

  'Oh God,' Layla's mother whispered. 'Oh God, help us.'

  Who the men were, what faction they belonged to, how they had found out about her father's good deed, and so quickly, Layla never discovered. All she remembered was a sudden mass of people around the car, their faces hidden behind checked keffiyehs, the crack of a pistol as they shot the Israeli at point-blank range through the open window, and then her father being dragged out onto the street to screams of 'Radar! A'mee!' – 'Traitor! Collaborator!' Her mother had tried to follow, but they had slammed the car door against her head, knocking her unconscious. They had beaten her father, viciously, unremittingly, a crowd of onlookers gathering to watch, many of them patients of his, not one of them trying to help, not one of them offering even the faintest whimper of protest, then handcuffed his hands behind his back and dragged him out onto the sandy wasteground that surrounded the camp. She had gone after them, weeping and screaming and pleading for her father's life, but to no avail. They pushed him down into a hollow, a baseball bat appeared out of nowhere and, with a sickening crack, was smashed into the back of her father's head, pitching him face forwards onto the ground. Three further blows rained down, opening his skull like a watermelon, before, as suddenly as they had come, the men were gone again, leaving her to crawl across and cradle her father's broken body in her arms, her long black tresses slopping in his blood, the howls of wild dogs echoing in the distance.

  'Oh God, my daddy! Oh God, my poor daddy!'

  Of the events of that night Layla had never spoken to anyone, not even her mother. The following day, after her father's funeral, she had taken a pair of scissors and hacked off her hair, unable to bear the feel of her father's blood that still seemed to linger however many times she washed it. Two days after that she and her mother had packed up and left Palestine for good, returning to England where they set up home with Layla's grandparents, who owned a large cottage in a village on the outskirts of Cambridge. She remained there for four years before, to her mother's horror, she announced she was going back.

  'But why?' her mother had cried. 'For God's sake, Layla! After what's happened? After what they did? How can you?'

  She had been unable to explain, beyond saying that she needed to put things right, wipe the slate clean. Which was, in a sense, what she had been doing ever since.

  LUXOR

  It was only when he arrived back home that evening that Khalifa remembered they were having people round for dinner.

  'They'll be here in a minute!' huffed his wife Zenab as he came through the front door, bustling past him with a tray of torshi and babaghanoush and disappearing into the living room of their small, cramped apartment. 'Where have you been all this time?'

  'Down at Karnak,' replied Khalifa, lighting a cigarette. 'Business.'

  There was a clatter of plates and Zenab reappeared, plucking the cigarette from his mouth, kissing him swiftly on the lips and popping the cigarette back in again. She was wearing an embroidered cotton caftan, the top three buttons open to reveal a hint of swelling breast, and had plaited her ebony-black hair into a long tress that hung down her back almost to the level of her waist.

  'You look beautiful,' he said.

  'And you,' she countered with a smile, flicking his earlobe playfully, 'look terrible. Why don't you go and have a shave while I finish up with Batah? And try not to wake the baby. I've only just got him down.'

  She kissed him again, on the cheek this time, and disappeared back into the kitchen.

  'Where's Ali?' he called after her.

  'Staying with a friend. And put on a clean shirt, will you? Your collar's all grimy!'

  He wandered through into the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt and standing in front of the mirror above the sink, staring at his reflection. Zenab was right – he did look terrible. His eyes were dull and puffy, his cheekbones jutted out like the ribs of an undernourished donkey and his skin was an unhealthy grey colour, like the surface of a stagnant canal. He flicked his cigarette out of the window, turned on the cold ta
p and, bending down, splashed his face with water, coming up again and looking himself in the eye.

  'What are you going to do, eh?' he asked his reflection. 'What are you going to do?'

  He stared at his mirror image for a while longer, shaking his head as if he saw something there that he didn't like, then quickly shaved and went through into the bedroom where he splashed some cologne on his face and changed his shirt. He was just doing up the last of the buttons, bending down as he did so to kiss baby Yusuf, who was asleep in his cot, when the doorbell rang.

  'We're here!'

  The voice of his brother-in-law Hosni barged in from outside the front door. Khalifa sighed.

  'Whatever you do in life,' he whispered to the baby, rubbing his nose back and forth across its smooth, soft forehead, 'promise me you won't end up like your uncle.'

  'Come on, you two!' boomed the voice. 'What're you doing in there? Or shouldn't I ask!'

  There was a raucous snort as Hosni's wife Sama, Zenab's elder sister, laughed at her husband's joke, which Hosni seemed to crack every time a doorbell wasn't answered within a nanosecond of him ringing it.

  'God help us,' muttered Khalifa, going through into the entrance hall to welcome the guests.

  There were six of them in total: Khalifa, Zenab, Sama, Hosni, and two of Zenab's friends from Cairo – Nawal, a small, intense woman who taught classical Arabic at Cairo University; and Tawfiq, a mashrabiya dealer whom everyone referred to as 'Goggle-eyes' on account of his unnaturally large, saucer-shaped eyes. They ate around a small table in the living room, with Batah, Khalifa's daughter, serving the food, which she liked to do because it made her seem grown up. Like her mother she wore an embroidered caftan and had her long dark hair done in a plait down her back.

  'I must say, Batah, you look more beautiful every time I see you,' said Sama as the girl passed round bowls of chicken broth. 'And I simply love that caftan. I bought one just like it for Ama. Three hundred pounds, would you believe!'

  Unlike Batah, Sama and Hosni's daughter was short, plump and extremely slothful, a difference her mother did her best to disguise by ensuring the girl always wore more expensive clothes than her cousin.

  'She looks just like you did at that age,' said Nawal, smiling at Zenab. 'I bet you've got all the boys running after you, eh, Batah?'

  'If I was a bit younger I'd be running after you,' said Tawfiq, laughing. 'Or sprinting more like!'

  Batah giggled shyly and left the room.

  'It's time you started thinking about a husband for her,' grunted Hosni, slurping his soup.

  'For God's sake!' cried Zenab. 'She's only fourteen!'

  'It's never too early to think about these things. Forward planning – that's the key. Always look to the future. Take edible oils.' Hosni worked in the edible oils business, and never missed an opportunity to nudge the conversation in that direction. 'When we relaunched our sunflower range last year it was on the back of eighteen months' careful preparation. And the result? An eight per cent increase in sales and a Best Domestic Oil award. You don't achieve that sort of success without thinking ahead.'

  He took another slurp of his soup.

  'We got a commendation for our nut oil as well. It's simply flying out of the shops!'

  Everyone tried to look suitably impressed, finishing their soup and moving on to the main course: lamb torly served with peas, okra, rice and potatoes. The conversation switched to mutual friends, then the recent Cairo football derby between Zamelak and al-Ahli, then politics, Hosni and Nawal getting into a heated debate about America's ongoing war against terrorism.

  'So what are you saying?' cried Hosni. 'They should have done nothing after September eleven? Just let them get away with it?'

  'I'm saying that before they start bombing other countries they should sort their own house out. I mean, why is it that when any other country in the world supports terrorism they get invaded, but when America does it it's justified as "foreign policy"?'

  Khalifa sat silently through all this, prodding at his food, occasionally interjecting the odd comment but for the most part lost in his own thoughts. The corpse at Malqata, Jansen's antiquities collection, the meeting with Hassani, the curious encounter at Karnak – all bounced around his brain like reflections in a hall of mirrors. And behind everything, like the backdrop to a stage play, always the same even when the scenes before it changed, that curious tattoo on the dead woman's forearm, a triangle and five numbers. Like the marks you get on meat to show where it's come from.

  'More lamb?'

  Zenab's voice echoed in his ear. She was holding out the bowl of torly.

  'What? Oh, no, thank you.'

  'So what do you think of him, Yusuf?'

  Tawfiq was looking at him expectantly.

  'Sorry?' said Khalifa.

  'He was miles away,' Nawal observed with a laugh. 'Probably thinking about tombs and hieroglyphs.'

  'Or women's bums!' Hosni chuckled, receiving a sharp slap on the wrist from his wife.

  'Al-Mulatham,' said Tawfiq. 'What do you think about the suicide bombings?'

  Khalifa took a sip of Coca-cola – as a devout Muslim he did not drink alcohol – and, pushing his chair back, lit a cigarette.

  'I think that anybody who kills innocent civilians in cold blood is disgusting.'

  'The Israelis kill Palestinians in cold blood and no-one seems to complain about that,' said Nawal. 'Look what happened the other day. Two children killed by an Israeli helicopter.'

  'That still doesn't justify it,' replied Khalifa. 'What's the point seeking revenge by killing more children?'

  'But what other way do they have of standing up for themselves?' countered Tawfiq. 'They're facing the most powerful army in the Middle East, the fourth most powerful army in the world. How the hell else are they supposed to make their point? I agree that it's horrible, but that's what people do when they've been systematically brutalized for fifty years.'

  'Like the Palestinian Authority's got such a great human rights record,' grunted Zenab. 'Like we've got such a great record.'

  'That's not the point,' said Tawfiq. 'The point is that people don't strap explosives to their waists and blow themselves up just for the hell of it. They do it because they're desperate.'

  'I'm not defending the Israelis,' said Khalifa, holding out a match to light Nawal's cigarette. 'I just think . . . well, like Zenab says, it doesn't help the situation.'

  'You're telling me you don't feel a hint of pleasure when you hear another bomb's gone off?' asked Tawfiq. 'That a part of you doesn't feel, "Serves them bloody right." '

  Khalifa stared down at the table, a spiral of smoke drifting upwards from the end of his cigarette. Before he could answer, Sama butted in.

  'I'll tell you what I feel like,' she said, 'and that's some pudding! Is that umm ali I can smell, Zenab? Why don't I help Batah serve? This really is a wonderful dinner party!'

  It was past midnight before they finally got to bed. Zenab fell asleep almost immediately. Khalifa tossed and turned, listening to baby Yusuf breathing in the cot beside him, watching as parallelograms of light slipped across the ceiling from the passing cars below, feeling the beating of his own heart.

  After twenty minutes he got up again and padded out into the front hall where he flicked a switch on the wall. A miniature fountain in the centre of the floor bubbled into life. He flicked another switch, illuminating a string of multi-coloured fairy lights arranged around the plastic pool into which the fountain trickled, and sat down on the floor with his back to the wall, rubbing his eyes. He had built the fountain himself, to add a bit of colour to their otherwise drab apartment. It wasn't the greatest piece of work in the world – the water didn't pump properly, and the tiles surrounding the pool were slightly misaligned – but he still found it soothing to gaze at it, to hear the rhythmic plop of the water and watch the refracted glint of the lights.

  For a long while he sat in silence, then leant to his right and punched the play button of a small tape recor
der sitting on a wooden stool. The rich, ululating voice of Umm Kulthoum wrapped itself around him, singing a song about love and loss:

  Your eyes take me back to days that are gone, They teach me to regret the pain of the past, All that I saw before my eyes saw you Was just a wasted life. How could it not be, When you are my life, your light my dawn? Before you my heart never knew happiness, It felt nothing but the taste of suffering and pain.

  There was a movement behind him and Zenab came out into the hall, eyes bleary, her long, slim legs protruding from beneath the hem of one of his shirts which she wore in bed. She leant down and kissed his forehead, the shirt riding up around her thighs so that he could see the vague shadow of her pubic hair, then she settled herself down on the floor beside him with her head on his shoulder, her long hair spilling across his chest like a dark waterfall.