by Tommy Tenney
The agent shrugged inscrutably, nodded his farewell, and took his leave.
MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS, JERUSALEM—MIDNIGHT
The intruder entered the highly protected perimeter like someone who knew the place—which he did. First, shrouded in the late-night shadows, he pulled out an invisible panel from the wall, reached in, and switched on an emergency override, which instantly disabled all alarm systems.
Then he slipped inside, holding a gun at the ready inside his jacket pocket, and made his way swiftly and guardedly into the central workroom.
There the Battaween documents awaited him.
Eagerly, with just enough pause to sweep his gaze around the room and check for camera lights, he held up the next document into a shaft of moonlight streaming in from a skylight above.
Then, like an addicted booklover unwilling to end his day’s reading, he began to devour the words before him.
He had to know what happened next.
Chapter Nine
JERUSALEM, IN THE EIGHTEENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF KING ARTAXERXES
My Dear Leah,
I just finished your letter, and have only now sufficiently recovered my breath to sit down and write back to you.
I can hardly believe what you have told me.
I am sitting here in a simple chair right outside my tent, not even two paces away from where the Damascus courier just handed me your scroll. You might be shocked to see the outward humility of my current abode, and I must admit that compared to my former quarters in the royal palace, a tent on the rocky soil of Jerusalem could seem like a vast step down. Yet you would hardly believe what freedom I feel here! What utter liberation from the stifling sense of being guarded and watched every second of my life! It has been bliss—at least until now.
Artaxerxes has not been King even two decades, and already threats to his reign may cause me to leave on the next caravan for home. In fact, I may return hard on the heels of the very reply you are holding.
But I digress, for reasons you probably understand. You see, when I grasped the scroll from his fingers and read your name beside the seal, I exclaimed out loud in delight, so overjoyed I was to be receiving news from you. But when I began to read and realized the import of your message, I could not help but gasp aloud, followed by frantic, anguished breathing, and finally sobbing tears. All in the space of merely a few moments. A sallow-faced little girl who dwells two doors down and has always been frightened of me turned with wide eyes, fled indoors, and summoned her mother, who stood at their threshold carefully watching me through dark eyes. I wiped my face and attempted a smile to assure both that I was in control of my faculties, but she has returned to the doorway several more times to check on me.
Oh, how my heart aches for you! To cautiously open your heart, to have it intimately examined, and then to have it summarily rejected is the cruelest of all agonies. My mind is racing as I try to find a place to start answering your question. For I certainly intend to.
But, my dear, the question you posed has been the central anguish of my life for the past few years. And not only mine, but that of the people dearest to me. Now including you.
Is my life, at least for any meaningful purpose, over? Has G-d’s plan for me been fulfilled?
My dear, Leah, I will certainly answer this question, if it takes all I have. Even if it requires me leaving my beloved Jerusalem and returning to Persia.
This is why I am praying that G-d will remove the wound of Artaxerxes’ rejection from your heart. That He will deaden your mind to the memories that evening seared into your deepest being. Having said that, remember, “Memories do not die. Memories must simply be replaced—with new memories.” You may never fully understand why you were not chosen.
But first, let me begin with what I know this moment. I will tell you about a conversation I shared with Mordecai on the very day I left for this place. The words of it came flooding back into my mind even as I read your letter.
As you probably have been told, Nehemiah’s caravan was delayed beside the Ahava River for several days. But on the morning our final go-ahead was signaled, Mordecai stood beside me, arms crossed, as I packed my final few items. I could tell something was burrowing deep within him.
“Well, my little Hadassah,” he finally said with a faintly bitter note in his voice, “I certainly hope you find the adventure you seek.”
“What do you mean?” I replied, not bothering to mask my defensive reaction. “You speak as if I am some youth off on a foolhardy jaunt.”
“I do not mean that. I only mean that you have had such a rich life. And yet you act as though experiencing even more is some kind of birthright.”
“Poppa!” I exclaimed in surprise, my voice raised higher than I intended. “We have talked about this so many times over the last few years. You know what I have lived through. You know what it was like to walk away from being Queen.”
“Yes, and you survived it. Just like millions of people before you have outlasted disappointment and loneliness.”
Just then I realized, from the deep pain in his eyes, that my beloved Mordecai was speaking of himself. I reached out to touch his hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice now softer. “I haven’t thought of you. I wasn’t thinking of . . .”
He covered my hand with his remaining palm and shook his head slowly. “You don’t know how much joy and fulfillment it has given me to raise you. To see what G-d has done with your life. But at the same time, today, I find myself wishing, looking around me . . .” His voice drifted off, and he looked into the sun, which he always seemed to do at times of great anguish, as though to burn away what they might reveal. When he spoke again, his voice had changed completely. “I was just thinking of life without you. Without anyone.” He glanced away, and the pain in his face seemed to mirror the loneliness he would soon experience. He had never married, for I had always been his world. While young, I had innocently believed that to be sufficient. Yet just then I realized the truth: Mordecai was lonely.
And I realized something else. He was being specific. By “looking around me” he meant that there was an ache in his heart—and it had a face, and a name.
“Tell me. Where have you been looking? Who?”
He shook his head most resolutely now. “No. I will not speak her name. There is no chance. It is not a possibility.”
“What is not a possibility? Love? Marriage? Why not? The wish for happiness and acceptance are also legitimate desires. G-d himself placed these hungers inside of us. You taught me that yourself, Poppa.”
He looked at me with the saddest expression I had ever seen him wear. “I am an old man far beyond the prime of his youth and the fullness of his vitality. I am not a man who attracts a single look from a woman.”
“You’re wrong. I have seen many women look at you.”
“That is only because of my station. My position in the empire.”
“Maybe, but that’s part of your appeal! You have every right to rely on your position and fame as Exilarch to woo a woman. Even though it’s only a part of who you are. You are so much more. You are kind and wise and the godliest man I will ever know. And you also happen to be the most beloved and famous man in all of Persia, second only to the King. Each of those things can be legitimately attractive.”
“Please, Hadassah,” he said, shaking his head emphatically, “let us speak of this no more. I am sorry to have brought it up.”
“Just tell me one thing,” I pleaded. “You are speaking of one woman in particular? There is one you long for?”
He inhaled deeply and stared up at the sky, and from that, knowing Mordecai, I knew the truth.
“She sees me as the King’s advisor,” he murmured. “A father image more than anything else. She esteems me, but not . . .” His voice trailed off. “And besides. She is absolutely unapproachable.”
“Poppa, I am a woman, and I can tell you that nothing is as simple as that. Perhaps she only pictures you that way because she sees
the resignation on your face. Or maybe G-d has yet to open her eyes. Maybe she has more of life’s road to travel before she is ready for you.”
He waved his hand. “It is not important, Hadassah. Please. These are trivial matters compared to the work G-d has given me.”
“No!” I said, almost shouting again. “That is where I disagree with you the most. You may be a godly man, but you do not know how He intends to accomplish His purposes in this world. How do you know that we only serve G-d through positions of power and influence?”
He sighed, looked at me, and chuckled. “Hadassah, as usual, you leave me without words.”
“You don’t need words with me. But let me end with this. You know this is the whole reason I am leaving for the Promised Land. I feel YHWH calling me there, even though I have no idea how I can possibly be of help. But I’m willing to trust what He put in my heart. And if He put love for a woman in yours, then you must explore that with Him.”
And, my dear Leah, you must explore that question with Him, too. To complete my reply to you, I now ask you to embark with me on yet another journey back into my life—this time into events and emotions more recent than our last correspondence.
The good news? I do, in fact, have an answer for you. And it is an encouraging answer. A heart-lifting, joyful affirmation. You will be glad to hear what I have to say.
The bad news? As your question is deeply felt, my reply might seem lengthy. But to have a peaceful answer to your question, I must tell you of some events that I mercifully withheld from you. They comprise some of the darkest and most agonizing low points of my life.
I have been where you are. And I know that if . . .
Chapter Ten
THE PRIME MINISTER’S LIMOUSINE—DOWNTOWN JERUSALEM—MINUTES AFTER HADASSAH MADE HER CALL
In the gloom of the Residence garage beyond her limousine window, Hadassah’s two escorts from Shin Beth, Israel’s domestic counterintelligence and protective service, struggled to ready their motorcycles. Like her, they had not ventured beyond the walls of the Residence in weeks, and lacking the proper lead time, her right “wingman,” as she had always mischievously called him, could not electrically start his motor. She could see him glance back at her with irritation as he rose and fell in his seat, futilely trying to stomp down on his starter pedal.
Clearly, both he and his partner were agitated by the abruptness of her departure, her apparent flaunting of observed procedure. She knew that in these days following the attempt on her husband’s life, security measures would be at their strongest. she could remember, from her briefings upon entering the Prime Minister’s Residence, that even scheduled outings could provoke a flurry of covert communications among a small army of sentries, reconnaissance assets, and even undercover operatives.
Yet today the whole apparatus would have to wait. If she had to, she would walk to Jacob’s office. She felt the certainty of this meeting like a tiny pebble gathering mass and hardness deep inside her heart, and she clung to its solidity as if her life depended on it.
To calm herself she leaned back into the leather headrest and savored the feeling of once more being dressed, out of her bedroom, and sitting upright.
She had not even sat in a vehicle seat since returning from her father’s Yiskor service, which she had attended with husband on one side, doctor on the other, each taking anxious glimpses of her face as she stared ahead without acknowledging either. Only three days after surgery to remove the shrapnel inside her, her pain extended beyond inner shock and grief.
At least all the media hype had resulted in one bittersweet byproduct. The circumstances of his death had made her father’s memorial a state event. Broadcast over live television, attended by thousands. She pictured the sea of anguished faces stretched before her in Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, reserved mainly for state events—“The Great Synagogue!” he would have exclaimed, eyes wide, his voice making that hoarse rasp it used to convey amazement—“For me?”
The thought was definitely a source of comfort, for Poppa had been a simple, modest man, completely unknown beyond family and friends until his little girl had married the head of state. He would have been shocked and overwhelmed to know he was mourned by an entire nation. His entire nation. If only he could have seen it, she thought with her first hint of a smile. If only . . .
With the deaths of her elderly aunts in the last few years, she had become sadly familiar with the Yizkor, the “Memorial Prayers” service. Yet she had not been prepared for the sight of Israel’s whole cabinet and assembled Knesset leadership sitting behind her in a show of solidarity, wearing stricken expressions.
Nor had she been ready for the words of the Yizkor Father’s Version, read with sonorous dignity by Israel’s Chief Rabbi: “May the Lord remember the soul of my father, my teacher, David Kesselman, who has gone on to his eternal rest. . . . ” And when the cantor, the most famous in the Jewish world, had begun to sing the classic lament E-l Malei Rachamim—“G-d, Full of Mercy”—his plaintive voice filling the synagogue’s vaulted heights with aching notes of loss, she had lost her composure and wept openly.
And she hadn’t been weeping only for her father. Every one of her relatives who had attended her wedding only five years before were now gone. Aunt Rose, who had surprised her by flying in early from America for her wedding, had been the first. Stroke. Grandma Grossman had died in her sleep, peacefully, from an aneurysm. Aunt Connie had died just four months ago of pneumonia in a Tel Aviv hospital.
Now, with the loss of her father, an entire generation that had once nurtured and upheld her had vanished within just a few short years. They had survived the Holocaust, but they could not survive time.
Now, without brother or sister, she found herself utterly alone. With both hands, she had clutched her husband’s arm, for he was now all she had left.
With a feeling of nostalgia so keen that it twisted cruelly in her still-healing abdomen, Hadassah tried to picture the world her relatives had known. The tumult they had outlived. The thought of it only plunged her into a swirl of pride, grief, and resentment. But she willed herself to continue, to remember and reminisce. As painful as it was, comfort accompanied the memories.
She tried to picture her father growing up in the rural Hungary of the early twentieth century—a place of occasional persecution for Jews, yet idyllic nevertheless. How he and five other relatives had survived the Holocaust by tracing a harrowing walk to the port of Trieste, where they had bribed their way aboard a ship to London and to distant, previously emigrated relatives. How a sister, two uncles and their families who had declined to make the trip perished in Nazi death camps. She strained to remember the stories he had told her about being a cold and terrified teenager, trekking through forests at night, avoiding German patrols and the shotguns of suspicious locals.
A growl from the long-delayed motorcycle start jerked her back to the present. The garage door tilted upward, greeting her eyes with the slate gray of a rainy midday, and the limousine was off at last. She moved her eyes away from the Residence driveway, the gates sliding open, traffic on Balfour Street braking suddenly to make way for the motorcade. But she could not shift her thoughts.
What a blessing this place, the reborn State of Israel, must have been to her beleaguered relatives, those first few years after war’s end! It was more than the rebirth of their homeland—it was an actual open invitation to a place they had only heard spoken of in hushed, emotional tones over Seder and Passover.
Still a bit light-headed from her prolonged bed rest, she yawned, refocused her gaze on the pedestrians lining the elegant sidewalks of Rehavia, Jerusalem’s most gracious residential neighborhood, and squinted to banish the ache inside her. But the sight of curious onlookers only reminded her of the crowds that had lined this same street on the morning of Poppa’s funeral. She could not forget the gratitude that had accompanied her first glimpse of eerie candle glow flickering up into all those tearstained, sympathetic faces. For hours they had stood
that night outside her residence.
And once again the thought of missing loved ones whisked forward all the memories, and the treasured people who housed them . . . now gone forever. No one to call and be greeted in a thick Yiddish accent, the lilt of pleasant surprise, the sound of those stories retold from a living mouth. No one to meet her for breakfast in the King David Hotel lobby and chat about the odd trials of being married to a head of state. No one to call and confess, as she would have if she could, “I’m depressed, Poppa. I’m so terribly depressed that I can hardly function; it’s the biggest challenge just getting out of bed. . . . ”
She shook her head, determined to rouse her emotions from the depths of grief. Glancing up beyond the front windshield, she saw Paris Square approaching—the busy interchange where not only would she turn left onto one of West Jerusalem’s busiest thoroughfares, but where large, vocal anti-Israeli protests often gathered.
A high wall caught the sun, casting its glare into her eyes—and she remembered. How could she have forgotten? The Great Synagogue, site of her father’s service, was hardly a block away, up King George Street.
A quick intake of breath and she quickly leaned forward from her position inside as—the long body of the Prime Minister’s armored limousine trembled between the crosshairs of anti-reflective binoculars protruding from the front drape of a large kaffiyeh, the ubiquitous Palestinian headdress, in the shadow of a quiet Rehavia rooftop.
The scout, a young Arab—ironically, not a Palestinian but an Iraqi—breathed more quickly at the sight. Here, at last, what he’d waited for, all these long days. The Jew she-dog was at last making her appearance. He reached out with his free hand and picked up his cell phone.
He held his thumb over the speed dial button of a preprogrammed phone number.