by Alan Gold
So Bilal sang along with the Christians, raising his voice for most of the song, mouthing the words he didn’t know and quietly, under his breath, changing the word to “Muslim” when the evangelicals shouted out “Christian.” He was a proud Muslim soldier marching onward, like the armies of Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him.
And now that the Jew guard was dead, there was nothing to stop him carrying out his mission. Tonight he was climbing the tunnel again. There were no singing Christians this time, no throngs of tourists. This time his problem was the night-vision scopes of the Israeli soldiers who guarded the holy places around the clock. And despite what his imam had told him about the joy of being a martyr, a shahid, who would feel no pain as the bullets entered his body, there was a part of him that was afraid, a part that he knew he had to keep under control. Escaping after his attack on the Jews would also be difficult, but what did escape from enemy guns matter when he had the afterlife to look forward to, a green garden full of blue water and seventy-two virgins to attend to his every need for all eternity?
In his backpack were four bombs pieced together that afternoon by his mosque’s bomb maker. Each had a timer, a detonator cap, and enough explosives to kill a cluster of Jews that would be praying at the Western Wall of the temple later that morning.
All he had to do was to get to the top of the tunnel and then continue along the path that led to the Western Wall, which the Jews called the Wailing Wall of King Herod’s Temple. There he’d emerge, place his bombs, and hide in the shadows until early light, when the Jews would come to pray. That was the time he’d watch with pleasure as heads and arms and legs flew here and there and people screamed and men and women and children looked at the carnage in horror. In the mayhem, he’d dump his backpack and outer clothes and make his escape through the Dung Gate and down to his village of Bayt al Gizah.
* * *
943 BCE, the month of Sivan
MATANYAHU, SON OF NABOTH, son of Gamaliel, of the descent by God from the tribe of Judah, lay on his back, looking up in suspicion at the shard of stone that was poised to drop onto his throat. Like any good tunnel builder, he knew not to make a sudden move or to continue chipping at the stone until he was certain that such a move wouldn’t bring a rockslide down on his head. The evil-looking shard, more like a dagger than a stone, was pointed like a needle, and could—no, would—do him great harm if it dropped and speared him.
Matanyahu’s experience told him that if he hit the rock in the wrong way it would dislodge and fall, piercing his throat and probably killing him in the process. In the days of his father, Naboth, son of Gamaliel, a tunnel builder called Ezekiel of blessed memory had been carried out from a tunnel when a similar shard had fallen from a roof and pierced his eye; he’d died in agony a week afterward, and Matanyahu, although only a boy at the time, could still remember the poor man’s screams.
Blinking the dust from his eyes, he maneuvered himself so that if his next hammer blow dislodged the shard, it would land away from his body. He realized he was sweating despite the cool of the tunnel and the constant wetness from the underground river.
Matanyahu hammered a seam in the rock and clenched his eyes shut as the dust fell away into his face. He rolled over onto his shoulder, spat dust from his mouth, and then brought the hammer back, poised to strike again. But he hesitated. It was going to be a long day. He called out to the slaves nearby hauling rubble.
“Sing. Sing a song of King David, so that the Lord Almighty guides my hammer and my chisel, and the rock comes off without killing me.”
Matanyahu continued to hit the rock, and eventually the shard dislodged and fell harmlessly a cubit away from him, breaking in two. He thanked the Lord Yahweh, then he thanked Solomon for giving him the job of building the tunnel that ran along an old water pathway from the top of the city of Jerusalem, all the way to the bottom, where it watered the crops of the farmers who fed the city.
Solomon! Solomon the Wise! Just two days earlier, King Solomon had made a surprise visit to the tunnel; Matanyahu had no idea he was visiting or he’d have prepared an offering. One moment the tunnel builder was on his back, covered in filth and debris and dust. The next moment he saw a man in rich garments lying beside him, asking him questions.
To his eternal shame, half-blinded by dust, Matanyahu snapped, “Fool of a man, this is dangerous work. Get out of here immediately or I’ll tell King Solomon.”
The fool of a man laughed, and said, “Then you’d better tell me now how stupid I am!”
Solomon continued laughing while Matanyahu stammered apologies. But the king waved him off and commended him on the excellent progress of his work.
In preparation for the building of the temple, Solomon had ordered the construction of a tunnel, expanding the watercourse that ran underneath his city of Jerusalem to the source of water at the top of the hill where the pagan building sat. And Matanyahu was just the man to build such a tunnel. He loved the dark and the damp. His wife said he was mad and ridiculed him to all the others, but when he came home after a day of chipping away at the rocks and ordering his slaves to carry out the debris and dump it into the valley—after being drenched in the ever-flowing water or sprayed by the drips that dropped from the roof of the tunnel—he walked into his house and he was cool, while his wife was pink from the heat. She might ridicule him, but she spent these summer days in exhaustion. Yes, he was dirty, but as a tunnel builder he could afford a plentiful supply of water from the well, and his servants knew to have clean towels to wash and wipe his face and body, his arms and legs. So when they sat for their meal he would be clean and cool, while his wife, she who ridiculed him, would still be pink and hot. And he would smile smugly to himself.
But those thoughts were for tonight. He still had a complete day of work to do. And that meant hacking away at the rocks on top and to the sides of the tunnel, which had been built by the Jebusites to fetch their water.
In years long past David, king of the north and south of Israel, had captured the city of Jebus from the Jebusites. His captain had secretly climbed this watercourse from the valley, under the impenetrable walls, and opened the gates. It was one of the last of the Jebusite cities to be conquered by the Israelites, but this was the important one, for it sat on the border separating the ten tribes of Israel in the north from the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the south, and David needed to show he was king of all Israel.
David himself had been forbidden by God from building a temple on top of the mountain called Moriah; this task fell to his son, Solomon, and it had become his driving mission to rid his land of the shrine to the child-eating gods Ba’al and Moloch. Yahweh had to replace them on the top of the sacred mountain.
The worshippers of those stone gods were long gone, but still their pagan building remained because the priests of the Israelites refused to allow any Jew to step onto land where pagan worship had been exercised. So the building remained, and Solomon’s dream of a vast temple—a source of power and glory, of wealth and fame, built to the exaltation of Yahweh and himself—remained unfulfilled.
EVEN THOUGH HE HATED THEM as the enemy of King David, Matanyahu had to admit that the ancient tunnel builders had done a first-class job in extending what must have been a natural watercourse into somewhere that slaves could easily ascend and descend beyond the walls of the city to fetch their masters’ water.
But the family of merchants who had been sanctioned by King Solomon to collect taxes to build his temple when the priests allowed it had also been told to raise money for the extension and widening of this tunnel. For King Solomon the Wise had determined that the people of the city of Jerusalem needed a secure source of water if the city was under siege, and so he had ordered Matanyahu and his slaves to improve what the ancient inhabitants of Jebus had done.
The work was filthy, dangerous, well paid, and he loved it. What Matanyahu enjoyed most was being in a place where he could see his work improve every single day. The more he banged and chiseled
, the larger and more amenable the tunnel became. Where once he’d crouched, now he could stand. In the seven months he and a few other master stonemasons had been hacking away, they’d extended the tunnel remarkably, and the year they’d estimated it would take could actually be revised down to months. It wasn’t pleasant work to be wet all the day long, but it certainly was better than being in the fields tending sheep, with ravenous foxes and wolves and lions constantly on the prowl, and a desert wind screaming in his ears, blowing sand into every opening God had made into a man’s body.
At the beginning of his life, as a boy of seven, he’d been a shepherd, and all day, every day, he’d take his sheep from their pen beyond Jerusalem’s walls, down into the valley where the thin but constant river that flowed from the Spring of Gihon ensured vegetation. He’d watch them drink, frolic, eat, and at the end of the day he’d round them up and put them back in their pen so that the guard ensured no wolves or foxes took one. And that was what he did the following day and the day after.
At the age of twelve, he’d been given by his father as a bonded apprentice to a metalworker in return for his food and lodging, and spent years building and lighting and tending the furnace so that his master could heat the iron, then beat it, then heat it—day in and day out.
So when his father, Naboth of blessed memory, died, he suddenly found himself free to pursue a profession he’d chosen himself. He would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a tunnel builder. First he became a rock cutter, then a mason, and then after the death of King David, in the reign of the blessed King Solomon the Wise, he’d specialized in tunnels. Few wanted to do this work. Most were afraid of the dark and the damp. Some told fantastic stories of the collapse of the tunnels and men dying in the dark and cold, starving to death before they could be rescued. But Matanyahu trusted his hands and his tools. The rock was familiar, like an old friend, and he had an instinct of when a rockfall might take place and knew how to avoid it.
And he had one other blessing that he knew would protect him from any harm. In his pocket was a seal, a precious stone that a scribe had faithfully inscribed—a seal that he carried with him at all times, and which, the moment he reached the top of the shaft, he’d place on a ledge so that God Almighty and all Israelites who passed to collect their water would know of his work and devotion, and he would be blessed in the afterlife. He’d done this on every tunnel and on top of every building he’d ever constructed. It was Matanyahu’s way of ensuring that Yahweh God knew of his work as a great builder when he died and ascended into the heavens for judgment.
Meanwhile, he had many cubits of rock to cut that day, and his slaves were waiting patiently, sitting in the cold tunnel below him, some with their feet in the stream of water, others resting before their backbreaking work began, and others still eating their rations. Lying on his back in the cramped area directly beneath the roof, a cloth covering his face to protect him from the dust and debris, Matanyahu began to seek out a fault or an edge that he could use to begin chiseling. Provided he hit to his left or his right, then chips or lumps of rock or even boulders that were dislodged wouldn’t fall on him. But that shard of rock pointing at his throat had frightened him.
* * *
October 16, 2007
THE PAIN IN HIS SHOULDER and his leg was excruciating. He gasped in shallow breaths because breathing hurt. It was like being hit repeatedly with a hammer. Bilal’s eyes were nearly blinded by sweat, but he had to get out of the glare of the arc lights that were shining on him. He distantly heard voices screaming at him to stay still, not to move, throw down his backpack, put his arms on the back of his head.
His fury made him crawl toward the beginning of the shaft, away from the temple wall, out of the burning lights of the Jews. Another gunshot rang out beside his head, kicking up dust, which clung to his sweating cheeks.
“Stop right there!” shouted a voice in Arabic over a bullhorn. “Remain still, or the next shot will be at your head. Keep still! If you move, you will be shot dead. Stay still!”
But he crawled on, and soon his aching head and torso were already over the top of the tunnel. He heard more gunshots and felt a searing pain in his leg. His hands were too weak to grip the treads of the ladder, his arms gave way, and he tumbled down the well, screaming in agony.
Bilal landed in a crumpled heap at the foot of the steel ladder, the one that took visitors up to the base of the temple wall. The fall and the bullet wounds made him cry in pain. A part of his mind remembered his mission, and if he was going to die as a martyr, he would die blowing up the tunnel and the walls and bring the whole festering Jewish building down on top of him.
Somehow, despite the pain in his shoulder and arm and his leg, he managed to bring the backpack around to his front, and he took out one of the bombs. He smiled bitterly when he thought of the damage it would cause; he hoped that Jews would be up top, looking down, and they would die too.
Bilal tried to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but all he managed to do was to rub specks of dirt into them, causing him to blink furiously. It didn’t matter. He’d soon be in paradise.
He held his breath and prayed once more to Allah, telling his God that he would be with him shortly. Then, thinking of his mother and father, he pressed the button on the ignition switch that would explode the bomb in the backpack. He smiled as he felt the button move. But then he suddenly remembered that the bomb was activated by a timer, and all he would do was set off the primer. His last words were a prayer for salvation.
The flash burned his back and the hair on his head. It made a huge noise, and some mud and dirt and rocks came falling down from the roof of the cave. It pushed him from a sitting position onto the filth of the ground. He grasped the stones that fell beside him. He looked up and wondered how that could have happened, how he could still feel stones in his hand. There should have been seventy-two virgins . . . and where were the green fields? Then he fainted.
* * *
BILAL LAY THERE SHIVERING, wet with sweat, his face a mask of terror. Like a fox, his eyes darting this way and that, never once meeting the eyes of the soldier, policewoman, or ambulance driver who’d brought him to the emergency room. Handcuffed to the bed, Bilal had wet himself, and the smell of urine rose above the aroma of antiseptic, making people who were close by stop, sniff the air, and turn toward him.
The young policewoman looked at him in disgust. She’d been the first to notice the yellow stain spreading outward from his crotch to dirty the thin white bedsheet that covered him. As he was carried out of the tunnel at the base of Herod’s Temple, just moments after they’d challenged and then shot him, they’d covered him in a thermal body blanket to reflect his body warmth and treat him for his wounds so that he wouldn’t die in the shadow of the monumental walls. It had been removed when he reached the hospital.
A doctor came running down the corridor with a sense of urgency and pulled aside the curtain. She looked exhausted. The policewoman, Dorit, assumed that she’d been on duty all night and probably most of the previous day. That was how they treated young doctors.
“My name’s Yael. Who’s this?” said the doctor.
“Says his name is Bilal. That’s all he’ll tell us, except to say that he’s a Palestinian freedom fighter, blah blah blah, the usual bullshit. You know the rest.”
“What happened?”
“He killed a guard, climbed up David’s tunnel carrying four bombs in a backpack, and tried to enter the area of the Kotel. He was going to place the bombs at the base of the wall and blow up Haredi later this morning when they came to shaharit prayers. Stupid bastard. As if—”
“Wounds?”
“He wouldn’t stop when he first emerged from the tunnel, so our snipers shot him in the arm.”
The doctor carried out a cursory examination to determine the size and extent of his wounds, and saw that he’d sustained burns and abrasions to his back, his neck, and his head. None was life-threatening, but initial triage to stanch the bleeding an
d the pressure bandages applied to his wounds by the ambulance paramedics needed to be fixed properly.
“What happened here?” asked Yael, pointing to his neck and head. “And here?” she said, indicating his wounded leg.
“The shot to his arm didn’t stop him, so our guys were forced to take him down again, this time in the leg; but he’s a tough little bastard and somehow he managed to crawl back into the tunnel. He detonated one of the bombs but only the detonator cap exploded, which scorched his back and neck. Lots of smoke in the tunnel, and a bit of the rock work came down, but no real damage.”
Yael nodded and turned her attention to the young man. She looked at his face, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. A sudden loathing suffused her and threatened to overwhelm her years of medical training: Ignore the person, treat the body.
But he was a kid who’d tried to kill a congregation of religious Jews, and now he’d spend the rest of his life in prison. If, of course, she managed to save his life. She asked him in Arabic, “Bilal, are you allergic to penicillin or any antibiotics? Before I prep you for surgery to remove the bullets, I have to give you an injection to stop any infection. Do you understand?”
Surprised that he heard his language coming out of the Jew doctor’s mouth, he turned and looked at her. She was tall and slender and quite beautiful. She had big eyes and long, black hair.
Yael took a half step back. She’d experienced this kind of look before and expected him to spit in her face.