by Sam Bourne
So Shimon Guttman made it his business to travel around the mainly Arab eastern part of the city as freely as he would amble around the predominantly Jewish west. True, he didn’t come here anything like as often as, ideologically speaking, he should. True, too, that he looked over his shoulder every five or six steps and that his heart raced the instant he left behind the smooth stone and scrubbed, lit streets of the Jewish Quarter for the dust and noise of the Arab neighbourhoods. Still, he tried to walk as relaxedly as he could given those constraints, like a man who was simply strolling in his home city. As if he owned the place. Which, as a matter of principle, he believed he did.
There were a few shops he stopped into whenever he was in the market, which, he now realized, he had not visited for well over a year. (The campaign against Yariv had been all-consuming; everything else had slipped.) He checked in at the first, whose entrance was obscured by rail after rail of leather bags, satchels and purses. They had a pot that was intriguing, but hard to date. The second and third shops were apologetic; they had sold the best stuff and were waiting for more. They didn’t need to spell out where these new shipments would be coming from: Iraq had transformed the entire trade. A fourth had some coins which Shimon made a note of: he would tell his friend Yehuda, an obsessive numismatist, to stop being such a wimp and take a trip down here.
He was heading out when he caught a glimpse of the shop he had almost forgotten. Like the rest here, it had no front window, just a pile of merchandise outside which extended inside. To enter was to stand in the narrow floor space that was not filled with stuff, a canyon of goods on either side. At eye level and above, there was silverware, candlesticks mainly, including several of the nine-branched variety, the traditional menorah used by Jews during the festival of Chanukah. It always struck Guttman as the ultimate in commercial pragmatism, this willingness of the Arab traders to sell Jewish kitsch.
He surveyed the shelves almost hoping there would be nothing worth seeing, so that he could hurry away and get back on schedule.
‘Hello, Professor. How nice to see you again.’ It was the owner, Afif Aweida, emerging from behind the jeweller’s counter at the far end, a glass case housing a collection of rings and bracelets on velvet beds. He offered his hand.
‘What a remarkable memory you have, Afif. Good to see you.’
‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’
‘I was just passing through. Window shopping.’
Afif gestured for Guttman to follow him through the shop, up a couple of stairs into a back office. The Israeli looked around, noting the large, bulky computer, the old calculator, complete with paper printout, the layer of dust on the shelves. Times had been hard for Aweida, as they had for everyone in this area. The inhabitants of East Jerusalem, like the Palestinians in general, were the victims of what Shimon often thought of as a bad case of divine oversight, fating them to live in a land promised to the Jews.
Afif saw Shimon check his watch. ‘You cannot wait till my son brings us some tea? You are in a hurry?’
‘I’m sorry, Afif. Busy day.’
‘OK. Well, let me see.’ He was on his feet, surveying his stock. ‘Nothing too dramatic, but there is this.’ He held out a cardboard box with perhaps a dozen mosaic fragments inside. Shimon rapidly arranged them, like a child’s jigsaw, to discover the shape of a bird. ‘Nice,’ he said, ‘but not really my area.’
‘Actually, there is something you can help me with. A new shipment arrived this week. I am told there is more where this came from, but for now, this is what I have.’ He leaned down, resting one arm on a shabby leather chair which was disgorging some of its stuffing, to pick up a tray from the floor.
On it, arranged in four rows of five across, were the twenty clay tablets Henry Blyth-Pullen had brought to him just a few days earlier. Despite Aweida’s downbeat pitch, it was not dull-merely handling such clear remnants of the ancient past always excited Shimon Guttman-but it was hardly scintillating either. He checked his watch: 1.45 p.m. He would get through these, then be off to Psagot for that three o’clock meeting.
‘OK,’ he said to Aweida. ‘The usual terms, yes?’
‘Of course: you’ll translate all of them and keep one. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
Aweida brought a notepad to his lap and waited. His familiar pose, the secretary taking dictation. Guttman brought the first tablet out of the tray, felt the pleasing weight of it in his palm, not much bigger than an old tape cassette. He moved it closer to his eyes, lifting his glasses to get a sharper view of the text.
He gazed at the cuneiform markings which, even in as banal a context as this, never failed to thrill him. The very idea of a written record that stretched back more than five millennia into the past was, to him, intensely moving. The notion that the Sumerians had been writing down their thoughts, their experiences, even trivial jottings, thirty centuries before Christ and that they could be read right here, on tablets no grander or more imposing than these small bars of clay, was exhilarating. He imagined himself as one of those enormous radio telescopes, arranged in rows in the New Mexico desert, their yawning wide dishes primed to receive a signal emitted by a remote star millennia ago. Someone had written these words thousands of years ago, yet here he was, reading them right now, as if the ancient past and the immediate present were facing each other in conversation.
The first time he had been taught how to interpret the marks which gave cuneiform its name-the word literally translated as ‘wedge-shaped’-he had felt the emotional charge of it. To the naked eye, they were just squiggles that looked like little golf tees, some vertical, in pairs or threes, some on their side, also in twos and threes, arranged in various patterns, filling line after line. But ever since Professor Mankowitz had shown him how those cryptic impressions could be decoded as ‘In my first campaign, I…’ or ‘Gilgamesh opened his mouth and said…’ he had been seduced.
He dictated to Aweida. ‘Three sheep, three fattened sheep, one goat…’ he said after a glance. He could not read and understand these as quickly as he could English, but certainly as fast as he could read and translate, say, German. He knew it was a rare expertise, but that delighted him all the more. In Israel, there was no one to match his knowledge, with the exception of Ahmed Nour (not that Ahmed would ever declare himself to be living in Israel). Otherwise, now that Mankowitz had gone, it was just Guttman. Who else? That fellow in New York; Freundel at the British Museum in London; but only a handful of others. The journals always said there were only one hundred people in the world at any one time who could read cuneiform, but he suspected that was, if anything, an overestimate.
He picked up the next one. Instantly, merely from the layout of the tablet, he could see what this was. ‘A household inventory, I’m afraid, Afif.’ The next one showed the same line repeated ten times. ‘A schoolboy’s exercise,’ he told the Palestinian, who smiled and noted it.
He continued like that, setting the translated tablets onto Aweida’s desk, until there were only six left in the tray. He picked up the next one, and read to himself the opening words as if they were the first line of a joke.
‘Ab-ra-ha-am mar te-ra-ah a-na-ku…’ He put the tablet down and smirked at Aweida, as if he might be in on the gag, then brought the tablet back to his eye again. The words had not vanished. Nor had he misread them. The cuneiform, of the Old Babylonian period, still read Abraham mar Terach anaku. I Abraham, son of Terach.
Shimon felt the blood draining from his face. A kind of queasy panic washed over him, starting in his head, then cascading through his chest and into his guts. His eye sped forward, as far as they could before the letters became cloudy and indistinct.
I Abraham, son of Terach, in front of the judges have attested thus. The land where I took my son, there to make a sacrifice of him to the Mighty Name, the Mountain of Moriah, this land has become a source of dissension between my two sons; let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front of the judg
es that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows…
What reflex restrained Guttman at that moment, preventing him from saying out loud what he had just read to himself? He would ask himself that question many times in the days that followed. Was it an innate shrewdness that made him realize that if he spoke now he would almost certainly lose this great prize? Was it no more than the savvy of the shouk, the habit of a veteran haggler who knows that to show enthusiasm for any item immediately doubles its price, moving it potentially out of reach?
Was it a political calculation, a comprehension in a fleeting second that what he was holding in his now-trembling hand was an object that could change human history no less dramatically than if he were grasping the detonator of a nuclear bomb? Or was there a simpler explanation, one less noble than all the others: had Guttman bitten his tongue because every instinct in his body would hesitate before sharing a secret with an Arab?
‘OK,’ he said finally, hoping, by economy of speech, to hide the shakiness in his voice. ‘What’s next?’
‘But, Professor, you haven’t told me what that one said.’
‘Didn’t I? Sorry, my mind wandered. Another household inventory, I’m afraid. Woman’s.’
He proceeded to the next one, a tally of livestock in a farm in Tikrit. And somehow he ploughed through the rest, though he felt as if he were performing the entire task under water. The hardest moment, he knew, was yet to come.
He was no poker player. He had no idea if he would be able to conceal his emotions. He assumed he would not. His life was spent speaking from the heart, deliberately displaying all the conviction he could muster. He was not a politician, practised in the art of dissembling, but a campaigner, whose stock in trade had to be sincerity. And this man, Aweida, was a market trader: he had seen every trick; he knew how to read any customer instantly, upping the price for those who feigned indifference, dropping it for those whose lack of interest was genuine. He would see through Guttman instantly.
Then it came to him.
‘So the usual terms?’ he said, his throat parched. ‘I can pick one?’
‘As we agreed,’ said Aweida.
‘Good. I’ll have that one.’ He pointed at the ninth tablet he had examined.
‘The letter from a mother to her son?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, but Professor, you know that was the only one of any special interest. All the rest are so, how shall I say, day-to-day.’
‘Which is why I want that one. Come on, your buyers won’t care one way or the other.’
‘Ordinarily that might be true. But I have a collector coming in from New York in the next few days. A young man, coming here with his own art expert. He is obviously in a position to spend some money. This story-a mother and a son-will perhaps appeal to him.’
‘So tell him that that’s the story of that one.’ Guttman pointed at the tablet engraved with the schoolboy punishment.
‘Professor. These buyers get such items independently verified. I cannot lie. It would destroy me.’
‘I see that, Afif. But I am a scholar. This is what interests me historically. The rest are very ordinary.’ He was aware of the sweat on his upper lip. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep this up.
‘Please, Professor. I do not want to beg you. But you know what these years have done to us. We are earning a fraction of what we once could make. This month I suffered the indignity of accepting money from a cousin in Beirut. With this sale-’
‘OK, Afif. I understand. I don’t want to push you too hard. It’s fine.’ He reached for the tablet that began I Abraham, son of Terach. ‘I’ll take this one.’
‘The inventory?’
‘Yes. Why not? It’s not so dull.’
Guttman rose to his feet, slipping the tablet in his jacket pocket as casually as he could manage. He shook hands with Afif, only realizing as they made contact that his own palm was clammy with sweat.
‘Are you all right, Professor? Would you like a glass of water?’
Guttman insisted he was fine, that he just needed to get to his next appointment. He said goodbye and headed briskly out. As he ascended the tiered steps of the market, heading back towards the Jaffa Gate, he kept his hand firmly inside his pocket, gripping the tablet. Eventually, once out of the shouk and beyond the walls of the Old City, he stopped and paused for breath, gasping like a sprinter who had just run the race of his life. He felt as if he might faint.
Even at that moment, his hand stayed wrapped around the chunk of clay that had made his head spin and heart throb, first with excitement, then fear and finally, now, awe. For at that moment Shimon Guttman knew he held in his hand the greatest archaeological discovery ever made. In his grasp was the last testament of the great patriarch, the man revered as the father of the three great faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In his hand was the will of Abraham.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
J ERUSALEM , T HURSDAY , 12.46 AM
Their first stop had been the central police station in Tel Aviv, dropping off a distraught Eyal Kishon so that he could file a missing person’s report on his father. He was convinced that whatever curse had killed Shimon and Rachel Guttman had now passed, like a contagion, to his family.
All the while, even as he drove, Uri was working his mobile, starting with directory inquiries, trying to get any information he could on Afif Aweida. The phone company said there were at least two dozen, though that narrowed down to nine in the Jerusalem area. Uri had to use all his charm to get the operator to read them all out. There was a dentist, a lawyer, six residential listings and one Afif Aweida registered as an antiques dealer on Suq el-Bazaar road, in the Old City. Uri smiled and turned to Maggie. ‘That’s the shouk. And that’s our man.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because my father already had a dentist and he already had a lawyer. And he hardly had hundreds of Arab friends. Antiquities: that’s about the only thing that could have made him talk to an Arab.’
As they approached Jerusalem, well past midnight, Uri was wondering whether he shouldn’t head for the market there and then, try to track down this Aweida immediately. Eventually he conceded that it was pointless, that all the stores would be closed. Unless they knew the address of his home, not just his shop, it would be impossible to find him.
He drew up among the taxis outside the Citadel hotel, ostentatiously pulling up the handbrake to signal the journey was over.
‘OK, Miss Costello. This is the end of the line. All change here.’
Maggie thanked him, then unlatched her door. Before getting out, she turned back to him with a single word: ‘Nightcap?’
He was not a drinker, she could see that. He nursed his whisky and water as if it were a rare and precious liquid that had to be observed, rather than consumed. Her own style-a quick knock-back and then ordering a refill-looked positively uncouth by comparison.
‘So what about this film-making then?’ she said, removing her shoes under the corner table they had taken and enjoying the relief that coursed through her feet and upward.
‘What about it?’
‘How come you’re good at it?’
He smiled, recognizing the return of his own inquiry. ‘You don’t know if I’m good at it.’
‘Oh, I think I can tell. You hold yourself like a successful man.’
‘Well, it’s kind of you to say so. Did you see The Truth about Boys?’
‘The one that followed those four teenagers? I saw that last year: it was brilliant.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That was you?’
‘That was me.’
‘Jesus. I couldn’t believe what those lads said on camera. I thought there were hidden cameras or something, they were so honest. How on earth did you get them to do that?’
‘No hidden cameras. There is a big secret though. Which you mustn’t let on. It’s commercially sensitive.’
‘I’m good with secrets.’
‘The one thing you have t
o do, and this is really the key to the whole thing. You have to…No, I can’t.’ He screwed his eyes into a look of mock suspicion. ‘How do I know if I can trust you?’
‘You know you can trust me.’
‘The secret is listening. You have to listen.’
‘And where did you learn that?’
‘From my father.’
‘Really? I didn’t imagine him as the listening type.’
‘He wasn’t. He was the talking type. Which meant we had to listen. We got really good at it.’
He smiled and took another sip of the amber liquid. Maggie liked the glow it made around his mouth and eyes. He had, she told herself, one of those faces that you wanted to look at.
‘Anyway, you only answered half my question before. I get how you’re a mediator, but not really why.’
‘You asked me “how come”.’
‘Right. And that’s part how and part why. So tell me the why.’
Maggie looked at this man, leaning back in his chair, also relaxing now for the first time since they’d met. She was aware that this was some kind of respite for him, a break from mourning, a chance for lightness after the weight he had been carrying around for four days. She was aware that it was a fleeting mood, that it could not possibly last. Yet she couldn’t help herself: she was enjoying this moment between them. She wouldn’t just swat aside his question with a joke or a change of subject, as she had learned to do with the countless men who had come on to her in late-night bars in foreign capitals. She would be honest.
‘The why sounds so corny no one ever talks about it.’
‘I like corny.’
Maggie looked at him hard, as if she was handing him a fragile object. ‘The very first time I’d been abroad was when I volunteered in Sudan. While I was there, a civil war was raging. One day we were driving back and we saw a village that had been razed to the ground. There were bodies on the roadside, limbs, the whole thing. But the worst of it were these children, alive, but wandering around aimlessly, stumbling really. Like zombies. They had seen the most awful things, their parents killed, their mothers raped. And they were just dumbstruck. After that, I thought if I could do anything, anything at all, to stop a war lasting even one day longer, then it would be worth it.’