by Dan Sofer
He drew three deep breaths. The bathroom had two toilet stalls but he had used neither, so he flushed the one and stepped out the bathroom door.
She was waiting for him outside with a broad, friendly smile.
“Did you return this morning?” she asked.
“Return?”
“Come back to life?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not one of those.” To find out the truth, he’d have to play his real identity, or as close as possible. If anything was going to trigger a flashback, he wanted that to happen sooner rather than later.
She leaned in and lowered her voice. “It’s OK,” she said. “We get a lot of visitors like you. Some are just curious. Others want to join the Society. You don’t have to have died to want a fresh start.”
He swallowed the ball of emotion that swelled in his throat. Was she hinting at their past? Was she goading him into a confrontation? He studied her large green eyes. Those eyes had haunted his dreams, but today they contained no trace of rebuke.
She looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s me pushing my nose where it doesn’t belong. Let me show you around. This is the call center.”
She waved at the rows of cubicles manned by people with headsets. “The calls are from volunteers and donors mostly. The new arrivals usually get picked up on site.”
Alex nodded his head and looked around. There was a kitchenette and a corner office with large windows.
“That’s Moshe’s office,” she explained. “Moshe Karlin, one of the founders of the Dry Bones Society. Want to see the Absorption Center?”
He nodded.
They walked down the corridor and she showed him the classrooms, the dining hall, and the meeting room with the circle of plastic chairs that they used for their group sessions. He asked questions and she answered. She glanced at him often but without malice. If the gracious reception was an act, her performance was flawless.
“I have to give a class now,” she said, and she touched her hair absently. “Funny,” she said, with a bemused smile. “I still don’t know your name.”
“Alex,” he said.
She seemed to turn the name over in her head. Any moment, he expected her to shudder and convulse with fear, to stab him with an accusatory glare.
Instead, she smiled. “Nice to meet you, Alex.”
CHAPTER 23
That evening in the marble lobby of the luxury residential tower on Jaffa Road, Noga waited for the elevator and prepared to break the news to Eli.
The golden doors whooshed open and she stepped inside the mirrored box. After Hannah had confirmed the facts, she could keep the discovery a secret no longer. Would the revelation shove Eli back into the sinking sand of his old delusions?
An ephemeral black floor number projected on the golden lintel and climbed upward as the elevator rose.
Or had Eli been right from the start? She had dismissed his apocalyptic rantings out of hand, and yet now her laptop held the seeds of peace in the Middle East. Was that coincidence or Providence? Had God sent Eli to usher in the End of Days? Would Noga also play a key role in that cosmic drama? Had God caused Eli’s accident, as he had claimed, in order to bring them together?
As the floor number reached P for Penthouse and the doors whooshed open, she made her decision. No, she could not hide this from her partner in life. She’d roll the dice—lay the facts before him—and hope that he’d hold it together.
She punched the code into a keypad and the lock clicked open, but when she turned the handle and pushed, the front door of the apartment stuck. Something was blocking the entrance. She peered around the edge of the door. A dozen packing boxes littered the hall.
Are we moving? Eli had said nothing about that.
She pushed harder, shifting the nearest moving box until she could slip through the crack. Each box had a white address tag taped to the top. New York, USA. Manchester, United Kingdom. Durban, South Africa. She didn’t recognize any of the names. What was going on?
The trail of boxes led through the kitchen, down the corridor, and ended at the door to Eli’s private sanctuary. Noga had discovered the room on her first visit to the apartment, when Eli had lain in a hospital bed at Shaare Zedek. She had avoided the room ever since. The shrine housed a collection of old weapons and personal items—mementos from Eli’s imagined past and the pseudo-evidence that had fed his delusions. His presence in that room could only spell trouble.
She stood at the threshold. In the sunken den at the center of the room, Eli scribbled an address on another sealed package with a black marker, then looked up at her and smiled.
“Hey.”
“Hey. What’s going on?”
He hefted the oblong package in both hands and climbed the steps to the door. “Cleaning out some junk. Coming through!” He brushed past her. Nails and picture hooks marked the pale empty spaces on the walls where the artifacts had once hung.
She followed him to the kitchen. “You sold them?”
He lowered the package onto the kitchen island, beside another similar package. “People will buy anything on eBay. That’s probably where I got them myself.” He patted the oblong package. “This one might cause trouble in customs. A full-size claymore. A sword,” he added in answer to her blank stare. “Very old, very sharp sword.”
A few days ago, she would have welcomed a clearance sale of his bizarre collection. Today she wasn’t so sure. “You’re not keeping any of it?”
“Nope. Why would I?” His eyes narrowed. “Is everything all right? How did your meeting go?”
She placed her laptop bag on the counter beside the packaged sword and slumped onto a kitchen stool.
He moved behind her and massaged her shoulders. “Did she find a problem with the results?”
His hands felt good on her stiff muscles. “Not exactly,” she said. “The main thesis still stands, but there’s a glitch.”
He released her shoulders and sat down beside her. “What kind of glitch?”
“The Cohen gene is real; it appears in all the Jewish participants who claimed priestly descent.”
“And?”
Noga drew a deep breath. She wanted to hold onto this moment, possibly the last before her perfect life crumbled, the way it had in the secret garden at Shaare Zedek. This time she would be to blame, but there was no stopping now.
“Another group has the haplotype,” she said. “In large percentages. Too large to dismiss as outliers or statistical errors. And in the same proportion as Jewish priests to Jewish laypersons.”
“And the lucky group is?” he prompted.
“Arabs,” she said. “Or at least those that live in Samaria and Judea. Palestinian Arabs.”
Confusion crumpled his brow. “Are you sure the data is good?”
“I triple-checked. So did Hannah. There’s a clear Founder Effect.”
She didn’t need to spell out the ramifications. If Palestinian Arabs originated from a closed group of Jewish ancestors, then she had uncovered the key to peace in the Middle East.
She gazed into his eyes, searching for the old flicker of madness and bracing for another rant about the End of Days.
But Eli didn’t rant or rave; he didn’t laugh at her either. Instead, he touched her arm. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Sorry for what?”
He gave her a sympathetic smile. “That your thesis didn’t work out.”
She had to laugh. “Are you kidding me? My thesis did work out, but along the way it proves that Palestinians Arabs are actually Jews. Don’t you see? Think of what that means. This changes everything.”
He frowned. “You set out to find the Cohen gene. If it shows up among Arabs, then doesn’t that disprove your theory?”
She brushed his hand from her arm. “No, it doesn’t!” He was being unreasonable.
He looked away. He wasn’t kidding. “What’s the alternative—that Palestinian Arabs just happen to be Jews? That’s convenient. Now they’ll hug us instead of tryi
ng to kill us? The end to the conflict? Peace in our time?”
“Yes!”
“Come on, Noga. Palestinians are Jews? How does that even make sense? The simpler explanation is that the theory is wrong. Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation always—”
“I know what Occam’s Razor is,” she snapped. Now he was being mean, and his stubborn, self-assured manner was driving her insane. “You’re ignoring the facts,” she said, in the calmest voice she could muster. “This is shared genetic heritage, not some conspiracy theory. Genes don’t lie.”
He stared at her, a sadness in his eyes. “Let me tell you about facts,” he said. He patted a package on the kitchen island. “This is an authentic crusader sword. A gift to me from William of Ibelin. He sang pretty well but only when he was drunk, which was often. He limped on his right leg ever since of the Battle of Hattin, where he barely escaped with his life. In the year 1187.”
He pointed to another long package on the floor. “That’s an oriental rug made by Yusuf of Acre, a Turk and the best carpet maker I’ve ever known. He traded that rug for an old mule I had, let’s see, just over three hundred years ago.”
With a sweep of his arm, he indicated all of the waiting packages. “These are all physical facts. Can’t deny their existence. But what do they mean? To me they used to be memories collected over the course of a very long and eventful life.” He grinned at her. “Did you know that Moses was a terrible dancer, or that King Ahab had dark curls and a cleft chin?” His grin faltered as he blinked back a tear. “It’s all garbage. All this stuff, like the memories, they’re all just strands in a thick web of lies that I told myself to give my life meaning.” He turned to her and laid his hand on her arm again. “I don’t want you to go through that.”
She wriggled free of his grasp. “This is different,” she said. “These aren’t false memories propped up by random objects. This is a sound theory based on empirical evidence.”
Eli gave a bitter laugh. “This time is always different.”
He stared at the tangerine dusk through the French windows of the living room. “Messiahs crop up every other century. Their followers are experts at finding signs and omens. ‘This time the Redemption is here for real.’ The result is always the same. Disappointment. Disillusion. Often, death too. The greater the anticipation, the more destructive the devastation that follows. When will people learn? When will they stop betting everything on magical solutions and just accept the world as it is?”
He glanced at her and touched her cheek with the palm of his hand. He wasn’t angry or upset, only tired. “Trust me on this,” he said. “I’ve been there.”
CHAPTER 24
Ahmed listened to the whisper of the morning breeze outside and the groan of his empty stomach within. He lay on the cold stone floor of an empty cave. Surviving the night had been the easy part; the day would be harder.
He sat up on his elbows, careful not to bang his head on the ceiling of the cave. Long ago, many hands had chiseled the crawl space into the bedrock of the hillside. The ancients had laid their loved ones to rest on the stone shelves cut into the walls, along with provisions for the afterlife. Over the years, tomb robbers and, later, archaeologists had cleared out the gifts and the bones.
As a child, a friend had dared Ahmed to sneak into one of the gaping mouths of the old tombs. He had climbed the rocky incline between his village of Silwan and the old cemetery on the Mount of Olives, more concerned about slipping on loose stones than disturbing the old spirits within. As a child adventurer, he had entered this tomb in daylight, standing tall on two feet. As an adult fugitive, he had crawled inside on all fours in the dark of night. This time, the demons lurked outside the tomb.
The old grave made a fitting home for a dead man. He had spent his first day of freedom cowering inside, the visible world shrinking to the rectangular mouth of the cave. He watched cars move between the stone houses and leafy trees of the City of David across the Kidron Valley. A woman in a hijab hung clothes on a line. Any moment he expected the mouth of the cave to darken, filling with the muscular bulk of the Rottweiler. But the day had passed without incident. He had devoured his last crusts of bread and emptied his plastic bottle of water. If he didn’t leave the safety of the tomb while he still had strength, he would starve and make the tomb his home forever.
According to the old Muslim in the warehouse, this world was neither Heaven nor Hell. God had flung him from death back into the land of the living. Boris and Damas—even the Rottweiler—were men, not demons. He could not escape demons, but he might evade men. And in the real world, one place might still welcome him.
He crawled through the dust to the opening and peeked over the stony ridge. In the valley below, a white car parked next to the low square building at the Gichon spring. Satisfied that he was not being observed, he crawled outside, then rose to his full height and stretched his back. He peed into a patch of wild grass—dark yellow pee—and wiped his hands in the dirt.
Then he made for the quiet dirt road at the edge of Silwan, picking his way along the hillside and sliding down the bulge of bedrock. He strolled along the street, another dusty laborer late for work. Across the valley, a construction drill rattled. He turned this way and that, and looked over his shoulder. No one was following him in the jumble of lopsided homes and apartment buildings. The streets had no names, but he knew them by heart.
Two minutes later, he stopped before the spot where his childhood home had stood. The house looked nothing like he remembered. Tall, solid walls stood proud in a clean layer of gray paint. An impressive wooden door sealed the entrance.
Of course. His home was long gone, demolished by Israeli bulldozers, the fate shared by all the homes of suicide bombers. He had not considered that before he had boarded the bus with his bag of explosives and ball bearings. He had not told his mother about his plans for martyrdom. Some wealthy family had built over the ruins of his childhood. Perhaps they would know where he could find his mother. He clutched his stomach and leaned on the wall for support. Maybe they’d spare him a heel of bread.
The sound of scraping down the street caught his ear. A child walked toward him, dragging a stick in the dirt. He waited for the boy to pass and disappear down the street before he knocked on the door.
He was about to knock a second time when the door cracked open. An old woman in a black niqab peered at him with suspicion. Then her old eyes widened in the opening of the veil. She grabbed his arm, pulled him inside, and closed the door.
“Ahmed!”
She knew his name, and he knew her voice.
“Mother?”
He had not recognized her in the full head covering. His mother had always worn modest wraparounds of white and brown. She removed the niqab and looked him over, her braids of frizzy hair streaked with gray. The lines of her face had deepened and the skin hung looser, but the same glowing smile brightened her face.
She hugged him tight, and the first loving human touch in his new life felt so good, it pushed him to the edge of tears.
She held him out for inspection. “My little boy.” Was that pride in her voice or heartbreak? He had abandoned her to become a martyr.
“I prayed for you to visit me in a dream,” she said. “But I never thought I’d see you again.” She shook her head and wrung her hands.
Ahmed didn’t know how to explain his visit so he didn’t, and changed the subject to his more pressing needs. “Mother,” he said. “May I have something to eat?”
“Of course.”
She sat him down at a marble table in a large, clean kitchen with every modern appliance, and soon he gorged himself on a fresh pita stuffed with his mother’s homemade hummus and fried strips of lamb that she warmed in a microwave.
She watched him eat, her eyes drifting to his matted hair and filthy clothing, and concern clouded her face.
Ahmed washed the meal down with a glass of Coke. “This house,” he said.
At the mention of her ho
use, her features brightened. “When you… left, the soldiers destroyed our home.” The event did not seem to upset her. “But then they built me a new house. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Who built it for you, Mother?”
She leaned in to whisper. “A gift, Hasan said, from the governments that honor the families of our noble martyrs. Forty thousand shekels in cash too!”
“Forty thousand?” Ahmed had earned half that much in a year. He had died a martyr but his mother had received the palace. But now, he had come home.
“I missed you so, my Ahmed.”
“I missed you too.”
She leaned in again. “Tell me,” she said, a gleam in her eye. “How are you enjoying Paradise?”
Ahmed inhaled his Coca-Cola and coughed.
“The banquet of the martyrs?” she continued. “The righteous prophets. And your wives!” She touched her palm to her cheek. “The noblest beauties in all the world, for sure!”
Ahmed cleared his throat. How could he tell his mother that, not only had he not seen Paradise, but he had passed through Hell?
“Silly me,” his mother said. “So many questions. It is enough for me just to see your face again.” She glanced at the front door and that troubled look returned to her face. “I’m sure you’re eager to return to the afterlife. You can answer my questions next time.”
“Next time? Mother, I want to stay here with you.”
“Here?” A hint of annoyance had entered her voice. “That cannot be. You died a martyr, Ahmed. The people honor me. They call me Um-Shaheed. They invite me to social events and public gatherings. I sit with the leaders and dignitaries. They give me money and I want for nothing.” She sent another fleeting glance toward the front door, and her voice dropped to a hiss. “You’re not supposed to be here. You should be enjoying your eternal reward in Paradise, not visiting your mother and looking like a starving tramp, all covered in dirt.” Then she remembered herself and gave an embarrassed laugh. “You should be on your way.”