by Alan Gold
“What council?”
Naomi flushed. “Oh, nothing. I must be confused.” And she hurriedly looked down at her cup of herb water.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY Rabbi Joshua climbed the hill in the north of the city of Damascus with grave fears on his mind. When he was sitting in Reuven’s home, he began immediately. “I am told by Daniel, of the tribe of Judah, that you convened a meeting of some citizens and proposed a council of governors to rule Israel on our return. It is to replace me as the chief rabbi and Zerubbabel, the grandson of our last king, Jehoiachin, and a descendant of King David. Is that correct?”
Reuven had anticipated that Daniel would go immediately to Joshua and tell him of the nature of the meeting. “Yes!” he said tersely. “And no! You will always be the chief rabbi, but the days of Israel having kings is over, Joshua.”
“Then who will lead our country? What will this council do when we get to Israel?”
“Govern.”
“It is the role of kings to govern, and above them the Lord God Almighty. It is not for you or any other to decide who shall govern.”
“And who is our king? Who determined that he would be king? What say do the people have in who should lead them in the perilous times ahead?”
“The people are under the rule of God, through their king. As it was in the days of David and Solomon; as it will be again when we rebuild Jerusalem.”
“And after David and Solomon’s rule . . . let me think . . . who did we have as kings? Who did Almighty God decide would reign and protect the Israelite people? Oh, yes, we had Rehoboam, who lost us ten of our twelve tribes; then we had Abijah, who tried to reunite the kingdoms of north and south Israel, but lost; after him, we had Asa, another failure, and then Jehoshaphat . . . Need I go on, Rabbi Joshua? One more useless than the other.”
“You lie,” said Joshua. “These were good men who tried but failed to reunite our kingdoms. But they were of the line of King David, and so God decreed that—”
“God? Forgive me, Joshua, but I get as much grace and favor from worshipping the wooden and stone idols of Marduk and Ea and Apsu as I do from lifting my face to heaven and asking the clouds to come down and help me. God will not lift stone upon stone and rebuild Jerusalem. Only we can do that, with or without the help of a god or gods.
“And it was for this reason that I called the council together. Men of trade, merchants, builders, metalworkers and woodworkers, farmers and scribes. Each brings a skill to the governance of the land. Each will contribute and make decisions. And in that way—”
“Then you want to be the king of Israel!”
“Fool! I want no kings of Israel. I want no priests to rule over us. I want our land to be ruled by those best able to rule it, not men who climb onto the throne from birth because their fathers had ruled.”
“Blasphemy, Reuven. For this I could have you stoned,” Joshua said, barely able to contain his fury.
Reuven smiled. “Stoned? But there are no stones in the desert, Rabbi—only sand, and that slips through your fingers.”
* * *
November 2, 2007
THE VILLAGE was as she remembered it. Perhaps it had grown marginally on the outskirts, but she could see that little had changed in the older parts as she drove her car through the precariously narrow, steep streets until she came to the middle of the village.
She parked the car in a lane and walked into the town. She breathed in the midday air of cooking, an aroma of olive oil, hummus, t’china, and roasted meats. It was as though nothing had moved forward or developed since she’d been here last. Indeed, in these villages, little had changed in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Yael looked up toward the roofs of the houses. Apart from the occasional television aerial and electrical wires connecting homes to poles, she could have been looking at a biblical or medieval village.
Four streets away, a much older and dustier car pulled into a side street and parked. Its driver, Hassan from the Palestinian village of Bayt al Gizah, close to Jerusalem, had followed Yael from where she lived and tracked her on the long journey, often finding it hard to keep sight of her sports car as she accelerated up hills and down into valleys on her way north. But luck had been on his side, and she was unaware that anybody was tailing her.
Dressed in jeans and a frayed T-shirt, Hassan walked in the shadows of the buildings toward the center of the village. There he stood beside a wall of a house, peering at the small reservoir of water that came from the spring in the village square, the single café with its primitive awning, and the houses clustered around; and he looked carefully at the raven-haired woman who’d left her car and was walking into the village. She was the reason he was here.
Yael sat at the café and slowly sipped a freshly squeezed orange juice. She was the sole customer. Indeed, there were very few people in the center of Peki’in. Occasionally an elderly man or woman would walk out of one of the narrow lanes that led to the village square, look at her, scowl, and then walk away down one of the other lanes. One of the men wore very baggy trousers, the middle of which reached down to his knees. Hassan had never seen a Druze man wearing his distinctive clothing.
Yael, having been here before, admired the Druze, who now controlled the village. They were a peaceable and loving people despite the recent assaults against the few Jews who lived in the village. She smiled as she watched them passing in the streets. The women usually wore blue or black dresses with their heads covered by a mandil and shuffled along in red slippers. But the initiated men, the uqqal, wore baggy pants that were tied at the ankles. In their tradition, they believed that a man, not a woman, would give birth to the Messiah, and his body would drop suddenly from the body of the man. So, in order to prevent the Messiah from hitting the ground, all initiated men dressed in baggy trousers. Yael thought that the strange pants seemed perfectly in keeping with the huge mustaches with hand-waxed tips the men sported.
The owner of the café came and stood in front of her. He tilted his head and smiled. “I remember you. Many years ago. Here with the army. In uniform. Yes?”
“You have a very good memory,” Yael said somewhat incredulously, and could not escape the fact that being alone in this village with this Druze man made her uncomfortable and wary. She worried about the stories she’d been told about the Druze villagers of Peki’in driving out the few remaining Jews because of some nonsense about mobile-phone aerials. And it really was nonsense; a story had spread that the aerials that had been erected would cause cancer in the Druze population. But peace was now, apparently, restored.
The man looked Yael up and down as if appraising her in advance of what he was about to say next, then smiled. “Your friends were rude. Your army friends. I remember.”
“I don’t,” she said, trying not to sound offended.
The man shrugged. “Yes, you do. You apologized for them. Why, I remember you . . .” He tapped his temple to confirm the memory. “But no matter.” He changed the subject. “You want food? Something to eat?”
“No food, thank you. Just another orange juice.”
The man retreated from the table but then turned back to Yael, whose attention had drifted to the deserted street.
“Not all the Jews have gone, you know.”
Yael turned back to face him, uncertain of what he might mean.
“One old Jewish woman still lives here. A few others.”
“It’s a shame so many left,” said Yael. “This village was Jewish since the time of the Bible.” She finished her juice, but if the man appreciated the barb, he hid it behind his mustache.
“But many Jews love to come visit here from all over—from Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem—to see the synagogue.” The smile grew broader and his waxed mustache curled upward in a strange demonstration of pride. “Is that why you’re here?”
Yael set down her glass. “I’m looking for someone, for a family that lived here many, many years ago . . .” She told him she was looking for town records, birt
hs, deaths, and marriages. The man seemed intrigued but had nothing to offer, and directed her to the town hall and the mayor.
As Yael stood and walked in the direction the café owner had indicated, Hassan followed, keeping to the shadows. When she went into the building, he remained outside, watching.
Moments later she was standing at the counter of the records department of Peki’in, talking to the young man who listened to her request. He nodded, said very little, and disappeared into a back room. Yael looked around for computers so that she could check the records, and then her heart dropped when she realized that a place like this almost certainly wouldn’t have computerized their older records. So she’d have to look through year after year of village births, deaths, and marriages in order to find out what she wanted to know. In Jerusalem, a quick registry search by computer would find her what she needed in moments, but Peki’in was a couple of hundred miles north and centuries behind the rest of Israel.
The young man returned and ushered her into a side office, where ten large ledgers were on the table. He told her that these were the records of Peki’in dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
“Don’t you have older records?” she asked.
The young man shook his head. “There were no real records kept before that.”
“So why did they start keeping records in the 1800s?” asked Yael.
The young man smiled broadly as if he had waited years for someone to show any interest. “Alexander the Great and Napoleon!” he declared with dramatic effect.
“Excuse me?”
The young man took a deep breath. “You see, Napoleon always wanted to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great: conquer the world from Egypt to India, just like Alexander did. But Turkey and the Ottomans stood in his way . . .” He gestured with his hands as if tracing a map that Yael couldn’t see.
“This feels like a history lesson,” she said drily.
The young man was unperturbed and pushed on, unwilling to let the chance to indulge his passion pass by. “Napoleon fought his way from Egypt to Palestine. He got as far as Jaffa, Nazareth, and Tiberias . . .” He again pointed to invisible dots on the map he’d drawn in the air and unconsciously slipped into the present tense as if relaying the events like a sports commentator. “The Ottomans are terrified, right? And they realize that this area is the perfect place to attack the French from the south where they’re vulnerable. Not just Napoleon but the Jews and the Arabs who live here . . .”
Yael interrupted the monologue in an effort to get to the point. “What’s that got to do with the records?”
The young man seemed taken aback by the question. To him it was obvious. “They kept records so they knew who was here and if they were likely to be attacked. That’s when our records began. Napoleon and Alexander!”
The young man’s pride in his explanation could not have been more apparent, but it was lost on Yael. Had she been more patient, she might have pondered how little she knew of the turbulent history of her homeland. But instead she looked at the books and turned to the beginning. The earliest records first started for Peki’in in 1802. The ink on the registry was faint but still legible.
Were she a historian, such reading would have been an indulgent pleasure. She read the names, the dates, the locations, and the comments written by the village scribe, who had recorded the ages of residents, inhabitants, visitors who stayed for more than a year, occupations, and ages; the scribe wrote the ages, sexes, defects, and perfections of those who were residents of Peki’in when the area’s history was being made. It took Yael an hour to read of the events that occurred in the village during the decades from 1800 to 1850. But there didn’t seem to be any mention of a new Arab family who had come to the area.
She was beginning to assume that Bilal’s mother’s family had been in the area long before that, in which case she might have to go back to Jerusalem and find out what national records there might be that recorded such details. But out of curiosity Yael opened the ledger that detailed the decades 1850 to 1890 and began to flick through the pages. These pages were written by a different scribe from the one who had recorded the earlier decades: the handwriting was different, and the comments about the inhabitants, visitors, and newly arrived residents became more caustic. She smiled when she read such observations as “In Samir’s house, a transient from Acre, one Mahmud the stonemason, who claims to have a truthful tongue. But Samir says he eats like a horse.”
For the decade 1850 to 1860 Yael read one, sometimes two entries in a section but noticed that the later entries for that decade were suddenly fuller. In earlier decades the population of the village had hardly changed, but as though some event had taken place in history the records showed that, from the end of the 1850s onward, more and more people had flooded into the village. Indeed, in the decade 1860 to 1870, the population of the village swelled by at least a third.
She read the names. They were all Muslim names. But when she read the comments, she was astounded. The scribe had written “Another exile from Circassia. This family, the al-Yazdani, consists of father, mother, and ten children. Where will they be housed?”
Circassia. She’d heard of it. It was somewhere in southern Russia. But why had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Circassians suddenly left Russia and come to live with Jews and Arabs in Peki’in and probably other villages? She opened the door and asked the young man, “Can you explain something to me?”
He looked to where Yael was pointing at the register and said, “Ah, the arrival of the Circassians. Few of their relations remain. Most moved on to the south. But Peki’in was one of a number of Galilee villages they first came to when they left Russia. It was part of the Turkish Ottoman Muslim Empire, and so they felt safe here.”
“But why did they leave Circassia?”
The young man sat, and sipped his coffee. “In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russians emptied Circassia of Muslims. They drove them out. The Russians wanted the valuable farming land at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Caspian and the Black Seas. Very fertile. The Circassians were sent to Anatolia and other parts of Turkey, where they hoped that they would be welcomed by their fellow Muslims, but the Turks hated them and settled them in impoverished mountainous regions and got them to do menial jobs. So many came south to Palestine in the hope of a better life. But the Galilee, and villages like Peki’in, were too small and underdeveloped for them, and so they continued their journey south to Nablus or Bethlehem or Jerusalem for work, and so they could rebuild their lives.”
Yael was surprised but didn’t want to show it. “So the family I’m searching for could have come from Circassia?”
“Sure. They may have lived in this region for thousands of years, or they could have come a hundred and fifty years ago from Russia. I have no idea.”
Thanking him, Yael left the building and returned to her car. Then she drove westward in the direction of Nahariya. What she didn’t know was that a much older and slower car, driven by a youth in jeans and a T-shirt, was following her, desperately trying to keep up.
* * *
ELIAHU SPITZER SIGNED his last piece of paper for the day. He straightened his hair and repositioned the yarmulke on the back of his head. His neck hurt, the small of his back ached, and his bottom was numb. As a man of action, as Shin Bet’s most senior field commander before his illness, he used to spend as little time as possible in the office, often less than ten minutes a month at his desk. The rest of his time was put to use in cafés and in safe houses and in Palestinian homes, talking in secret to people he was trying to win over as informants. There were two routes to Shin Bet’s success. One was money—the oil in his machine for such tasks as gaining information—but money could never buy loyalty, especially from those who had little. The second was simple blackmail: he would allow a Palestinian certain benefits, such as easy access to a jailed relative, or a well-paid job within Israel, and then, once ensnared, use the threat of exposure of the
benefit to persuade the Palestinian to give him information.
Israel’s Shin Bet and the nation’s external agency, Mossad, were the most successful and feared security forces in the world. Rarely did targets know that one of their own, trusted and respected, had been turned. Yet, never taking credit in public for their successes, always vigilant against the increasing number of Islamist and Salafi breakaway organizations dedicated to the destruction of Israel, Eliahu was at the pinnacle of the nation’s security hierarchy.
Until his heart attack. It had come suddenly. He was driving away from a meeting with other security officials early one morning, after breakfasting on his favorite meal, shakshouka—brought to Israel by Tunisian Jews, a mixture of poached eggs in a sauce of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and spices—when a crushing pain in his chest and throat nearly stopped him from breathing. Somehow remembering Shin Bet’s safety procedures, he drove slowly, forcing himself to cough all the way to the hospital as a way of artificially massaging his heart and forcing it to continue to pump blood. But the moment he reached the doors of the ER, he collapsed. He woke two days later after that fateful six-hour quintuple bypass operation.
Now, three and a half years later, he sat at his desk in Shin Bet’s headquarters with time and space to think. This doctor, this Yael Cohen, had left Jerusalem and traveled to Peki’in. Why? Eliahu looked on a map and found the small village in the northern part of Galilee, fairly close to the Lebanese border.
Why would a city doctor go to a backward place like Peki’in? He had checked with his sources in the major hospital in Nahariya and found that her reassignment had been largely unnecessary and completely unorthodox in the way it had been handled. And why had this American reporter for ANBN, this Yaniv Grossman who used to be called Ivan in New York, visited Bilal in the prison by the shores of the Dead Sea?
His instincts told him that they knew something. But what? The imam seemed confident Bilal hadn’t talked; yet, when he’d visited in the hospital, the boy suddenly became apoplectic. The imam said that the kid had somehow spotted them when they’d met in secret with Reb Telushkin in a village near Bethlehem, which was why he was going to be killed in the prison. But where did the doctor and this American reporter fit in? What the hell was going on?