The Last Testament

by Sam Bourne

  Not for the first time since he got to this country nearly twenty-five years ago, Akiva Shapira cursed his American upbringing. He watched the young men on manoeuvres in the vineyard, charging, three at a time, their knives thrust forward, ready to plunge into the easy flesh of three straw-filled mannequins, and he regretted that he would never be like them. It was too late now, of course. At fifty-two, and weighing over two hundred pounds, Akiva Shapira would never be able to join this heroic army of Jewish resistance, not in any active way. What pained him was not that his moment had passed, but his knowledge that it had never really arrived.

  As an American, he had grown up in flabby, comfortable, suburban New York. Riverdale, to be precise. While these young Israeli men had been taught the language of tanks, artillery and infantry as their mother tongue, reared as warriors from their infancy, he had been raised to join an army of lawyers, accountants and doctors. He had come to Israel in his mid-twenties, in time to do three months’ basic training, but by then it was too late. He would never share in the martial knowledge that formed so much of this society’s inner culture. He would never say so publicly, but for all his nationalistic militancy and political influence in Israel, Akiva Shapira could never escape the feeling that he remained an outsider.

  The men at his side had no such feelings, that he could tell. They all had long military records, the basic three years in their youth and a couple of wars each after that. They could watch this display and, later, discuss the mechanics of combat with unerring confidence. When they moved on to the shooting range, watching as a team of twenty-year-old marksmen darted out of bushes and popped up out of the undergrowth to fire at the row of watermelons lined up as targets, these men, all of them Shapira’s age or older, could whisper useful notes to the instructor. Shapira remained quiet, awed by the explosive blam that sent the fruits into a shower of pulp and gore time after time, without fail.

  He was relieved when the exhibition was over, when the young recruits were dismissed. Now the older men would talk strategy, Shapira taking his place at the table as an equal with the others.

  There were only four of them gathered here, in a meeting whose existence, they agreed, would be denied by each of them. Shapira and the man at his right were the only two who held formal positions within the settler movement. The man in the chair had gained fame, and notoriety, another way, as the quartermaster of the Machteret, the Jewish underground which made several terrorist attacks on Arab politicians and others more than two decades earlier. He had served time in jail and had, officially, retreated from public life. Most Israeli journalists believed that he now lived abroad. Yet here he was, deep inside the West Bank, in the heart of Samaria, as Shapira and his comrades would describe it.

  And yet, should an Israeli camera crew have stumbled upon this gathering-which they would not, since a heavily guarded perimeter enclosed the entire area-it would not have been the former Machteret man whose presence would have shocked most, but that of the figure seated at the outdoor picnic table directly opposite Shapira. This man was the personal aide to none other than Yossi Ben-Ari, the Minister of Defence of the State of Israel.

  ‘We’re here, as you know, to talk about Operation Bar Kochba,’ the quartermaster began.

  Shapira liked the name. After all, he had suggested it, to name this twenty-first century Jewish revolt after the man who had led the second-century equivalent. (That Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans had ended in disaster and exile for the Jews of Palestine, a fact Shapira chose to gloss over.)

  ‘Our preferred option remains mass disobedience within the ranks of the IDF. Yariv can have no peace deal if the army refuses to implement its terms. If he gives the order to dismantle a settlement like this one, like Tekoa, then our people will refuse to obey.’

  ‘But there was Gaza,’ said Ben-Ari’s man.

  ‘Precisely. There was Gaza. We expected mass refusal then and it didn’t happen. So we need a Plan B. Which is what you saw just now. Highly-trained young men who will throw off their IDF uniforms and take up arms to protect their homeland.’

  Shapira couldn’t help but look over at the aide to the Defence Minister. The fact that he was here at all was symbolic enough. But that he was listening, without protest, to a plan by Israelis to take up arms against the army of Israel-the very army his boss headed!-was extraordinary. That they had this man, and therefore, by implication, Ben-Ari himself on side, was proof of their strength, and confirmation of Yariv’s great weakness.

  ‘I repeat, we deploy these forces only once an agreement is signed and once the government starts enforcing its terms.’

  ‘But in the meantime…’ It was Shapira, his urgent desire to get on with it, to act, getting the better of him.

  ‘In the meantime,’ continued the quartermaster, shooting a glare in Shapira’s direction, ‘there are steps we can take to prevent any such deal. These efforts are already underway. You will have seen our claim of responsibility for the latest action in the Old City market.’

  The others nodded.

  ‘These pre-emptive steps then, aimed at destabilizing the government before it can commit national surrender, will be the focus of our energies. We have in the last few days established a small unit dedicated to precisely these activities. For now, gentlemen, our fate is in the hands of these men. Tonight when we daven the evening service, I suggest we each offer a silent prayer for the good fortune and success of The Defenders of United Jerusalem.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  J ERUSALEM , T HURSDAY , 3.38 PM

  The sensation was almost physical, as if her spirits were plunging, like a lift in a shaft. There was no denying it: they brought with them the breath of death. Anyone who got close to her or Uri, anyone who had been close to Uri’s father, ended up dead. Shimon’s wife, poisoned with pills; Aweida, stabbed in a street market; Kishon, driven off a mountain in Switzerland. And now this man, David Rosen, a lawyer who had been entrusted with Guttman’s last words, slumped over his desk before he had time to impart them.

  Uri approached gingerly, thinking, Maggie assumed, the same thoughts. He got closer, until he could lean over the desk within touching distance of the body. His hand hovered, unsure where to test first. Lightly, it came to rest on the neck, Uri pairing index and middle fingers to find a pulse. A second after he had pressed his fingers in, he leapt back, as if recoiling from an electric charge. At the same instant the body stirred, until both Uri and David Rosen were bolt upright, each as shocked as the other.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Uri, what the hell are you doing here?’ Silver-haired with large, unfashionable glasses, Rosen was thin, with spidery arms and legs. His arms, exposed by his short-sleeved shirt, were blotchy with liver spots. As he collected himself, Maggie could see faint red lines etched down one side of his face, the creases of a man who had fallen asleep on a hard surface. In this case, his desk.

  ‘You asked me to come here!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Maggie could see Rosen was looking for his glasses, even though he was wearing them. Also, bafflingly, he was speaking in English, with what seemed to be a trace of an English accent. ‘Oh yes, so I did. But wasn’t that yesterday?’

  ‘It was today. You just fell asleep.’

  ‘Ah yes. Arrived in from London this morning. Overnight flight. I’m exhausted. I must have fallen asleep.’

  Uri turned to Maggie, rolling his eyes upward. And our fate is in the hands of this guy?

  ‘Yes, Mr Rosen. You called me. Said there had been a letter from my father.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ He began patting his desk, touching the multiple wobbling piles of paper. ‘He delivered it by hand it seems, last week.’ Suddenly he stopped and pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Uri, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Please, come here.’ Uri approached and lowered himself, like an adolescent boy receiving a kiss from a tiny grandmother. Rosen hugged him, muttering what seemed like a prayer. Then, in English: ‘I wish you and your sister
long life. A long life, Uri.’

  Maggie gave Uri a stare.

  ‘Oh, yes. Mr Rosen, this is Maggie Costello. From the American Embassy. She’s helping me a bit.’ Maggie knew what Uri was trying on here.

  ‘What do you mean, the American Embassy?’

  It hadn’t worked.

  ‘She’s a diplomat. Here for the talks.’

  ‘I see. But why exactly is Miss Costello helping you?’

  He may be old and half-asleep, thought Maggie, but he’s not stupid.

  Uri did his best to explain, giving away as few specifics as he could manage. His mother had trusted this woman, he said, and, now, so did he. She was helping solve a problem that seemed to be expanding exponentially. Uri’s eyes said something even simpler: I trust her, so you should trust her.

  ‘OK,’ said Rosen finally. ‘Here it is.’ And, with no more ceremony than that, he handed over a white envelope.

  Uri opened it slowly, as if handling an exhibit in a court case. He looked inside, a puzzled expression spreading across his face, and then pulled out a clear plastic sleeve containing a single disc. There was no note.

  ‘A DVD,’ said Uri. ‘Can we use your machine?’

  Rosen began fiddling with his computer until Uri moved round to his side of the desk, placed his hands on the old man’s shoulders and gently, but unmistakably, shifted him out of the way. No time for courtesies, not now.

  He inserted the disc, then dragged across another chair and waited the agonizingly long wait for the programme to boot up and to offer the various prompts which, at this moment, seemed interminable and more annoying than Maggie had ever realized.

  Finally a screen within the screen appeared, black at first, then after a second or two, filling up with a line of white characters. Hebrew.

  ‘Message to Uri,’ said Uri, translating.

  Then, fading up from the black, a moving image appeared: Shimon Guttman sitting at the desk where Maggie herself had sat just last night. He seemed to be facing his computer. He must have filmed this himself, alone, Maggie guessed, remembering the video camera and other paraphernalia piled up in his study.

  She looked hard at the face, so different from the man she had seen in that archive footage online. Gone was the arrogant bluster of the hilltop speech. Instead, Guttman seemed haggard and harried, like a man who had been chased all night and had hardly slept. He was leaning forward, his face drawn and gaunt.

  Uri yakiri.

  ‘My dear Uri,’ Uri begain translating in a low murmur, ‘I hope you never need to see this, that I will come back to Rosen’s office in the next week or so and remove this envelope which I asked him to deliver to you only in the event of my disappearance or, God forbid, my death. With any luck, I’ll be able to solve this problem by myself and not need to drag you into it.

  ‘But if by any chance I do not, then I could not let this knowledge die with me. You see, Uri, I have seen something so precious, so ancient and so important I genuinely believe it will change anyone who sees it. I know that you and I disagree on almost everything, and I know you think your father exaggerates, but I think you will see that this is different.’

  Suddenly Uri leant forward and stopped the computer playback. He turned to Maggie, mouthing, with a how-could-we-be-so-stupid expression, Bugs!

  He was right. Rosen had phoned Uri; if Uri’s phone was tapped, then Israeli intelligence, or whoever else it was, would have had time to come here and bug this office. Could have done it while Sleeping Beauty was dozing on his desk.

  Uri now prowled through the office searching intently, stopping once he saw a TV set. He switched it on, found a channel airing American game shows-plenty of whooping and cheering-turned up the volume and came back to the computer. Then he went back to the TV, swivelling it around so that its screen was facing a back wall. ‘Hidden cameras,’ Uri mouthed to Maggie. ‘Most common place to hide them, the TV.’ Rosen looked more baffled than ever.

  Now when Uri translated, he did so in a whisper, direct into Maggie’s ear. Involuntarily she closed her eyes. She told herself it was so that she could concentrate on his words.

  ‘In the last couple of days I have come across what is the greatest archaeological discovery of my career. Of anyone’s career for that matter. It would be enough to make whoever owns it famous and of course very, very rich.’ Uri exhaled loudly.

  ‘Those would be reasons alone for me to fear for my life now that it has come into my possession. But there is something more. As always with your father, this something more is a matter of politics. That doesn’t surprise you, eh, Uri?’

  Uri shook his head. ‘No, Father, it does not surprise me.’

  ‘To get to the point, I have seen the last will and testament of Avraham Avinu. You heard right. The final will of Abraham, the great patriarch. I know it sounds insane and, believe me, I have wondered about my own sanity. But here it is.’

  At that instant, Maggie’s eyes opened wide. Uri stopped talking and they both simply stared at the computer screen, David Rosen as dumbfounded as both of them. Shimon Guttman, now with sweat beading on his forehead, had produced from below, out of vision, an object which he held up to the camera. Brown and around the same size as an old audio cassette, it was hard to make out. But Uri’s face shone with recognition. He knew exactly what it was. He must have grown up amongst these things.

  ‘I am not going to show you the text up close,’ Uri said, translating once more. ‘Just in case this recording should fall into the wrong hands. I don’t want anyone else seeing what it says. I know that will sound paranoid, Uri. But I fear that some people would go to extreme lengths if they knew this tablet existed.’

  ‘He’s right there,’ murmured Maggie.

  ‘You will be asking yourself the obvious question. How do I know this is not a fake? I won’t bore you with the technical details-the quality and origin of the clay, the style of the cuneiform script, the seal and the language, all of which are entirely in keeping with the Abrahamic period-but, I swear to you, any expert in the field would be almost certain that this is genuine. I say almost. What makes me one hundred per cent certain is that no one tried to sell me this, no one tried to convince me what it was. I found it, quite by chance, in a shop in the Jerusalem market. My guess is that it was stolen, from Iraq. It might have come out of the ground, it might have come from a museum, even the National Museum. Whether the thief knew what he was taking, we will never know. Whether the museum in Baghdad knew is also an interesting question. But Iraq makes sense. After all, where was Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father, born but in the great city of Ur in the land of Mesopotamia?’ The on-screen Guttman smiled. ‘And the city of Ur still stands today. In Iraq.

  ‘You can take my word for it. This text is real. In it, Abraham has come to the end of his life. He is an old man, an ancient man, who has reached Hebron. It seems his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, are close by. That makes sense, too: we know from the Torah that Isaac and Ishmael buried Abraham, so maybe they were there when their father died. There seems to have been some kind of dispute over Abraham’s will. We know from our texts, where it is repeated again and again, that Abraham bequeathed the Land of Israel to Isaac and his descendants, the Jewish people. I know you and your leftist friends can’t bear to hear this kind of thing, Uri, but just take two minutes and pick up the book of Bereshit, Genesis, chapter fifty, verse twenty-four, where Joseph tells his brothers, “I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. Or look at Shmot, Exodus, chapter thirty-three, verse one: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Leave this place, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt, and go up to the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”.’” Or this to Joshua: “Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath, and I myself will be with you”. That, by the way is Dvarim, Deuteronomy, chapter thrity-one,
verse twenty-three. You get the idea: that the Land of Israel was left to the people of Israel, there is no doubt.

  ‘But Jerusalem, it seems, was a more complicated matter between Abraham’s brothers, just as it is today. This text-’ on screen, Guttman held up the tablet once more, ‘-doesn’t spell it out, but it’s quite clear that Isaac and Ishmael had been arguing and that Abraham had to settle the dispute before he died. He must have called for a scribe to come to Hebron-such people existed, even thirty-seven centuries ago-and take down this testament. So that there would be no confusion.

  ‘In the text the old man speaks only of Mount Moriah; there was not yet the Jerusalem we know today. He does not refer to what happened there, but we all know, just as everyone around that deathbed would have known. Imagine the tension in that family! Mount Moriah was the place where Abraham was ready to kill his son. It is the ownership of this spot that Abraham decides in this text.

  ‘My dear Uri, you know the significance of this. The government of Israel now includes three different religious parties. If this text shows that Abraham gave the Temple Mount to the Jews, clearly and unambiguously, they will not be able to stomach a peace accord which compromises on that sovereignty. And what about the other side, our enemy, the Palestinians? Their government includes Hamas, devout Muslims who revere Abraham. If this text says the Haram al-Sharif belongs to the heirs of Ishmael alone, then how can they defy that will? More to the point, and I have thought about this long and hard, what of the first possibility, that this document gives that sacred land entirely to us, the Jews? What then? How would the Muslim fundamentalists cope with that?

  ‘That’s why I am sure that if either side were to know even about the existence of this tablet, they would take the most extreme measures to prevent it seeing daylight. That’s why I need to handle this carefully. I need to get this information to those who will treat it properly. Later today I will try to speak to the Prime Minister. But if something happens to me, this grave responsibility will become yours, Uri.’