On the Mountain of the Lord

by Ray Bentley

  Jack deliberately leaned on his last word in the hopes of provoking an apology or at least a partial retraction, but neither appeared.

  Instead, Halvorsham continued, “And what possessed you to be so insulting to the Islamic religious authorities? And to the Rights for Palestine group? Aren’t you aware the RFP group is a valued ally of ours in the quest for peace? And having chummy conversations with enemies of peace like settlement mayors and Bibi Netanyahu?”

  Why had he never noticed this bias before, Jack wondered? Since when did a supposedly impartial think tank label the Jewish prime minister “an enemy of peace”?

  Stiffly Jack replied, “I’m not aware of insulting anyone.”

  “You most certainly did!” Halvorsham insisted. “It was only by much prolonged and abject apology for your behavior I was able to head off a report to the Foreign Office about you. Think how badly that would have reflected on the Committee!”

  An apology for Jack’s behavior? So far there was no mention of the stabbing death of the policewoman Jack witnessed, nor the shooting attack of which he was almost a victim.

  “My instructions,” Jack explained, “were to conduct interviews and record impressions about Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and attitudes toward the rumored construction of a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. These things I have done. You will have the report in a week.”

  “Jack,” Halvorsham said with a concocted half-smile. “We value your expertise and your candor. We know Palestine is the hottest stove in the world. It’s no wonder you had such a struggle. Perhaps we should have sent several assistants with you to share the work. Maybe this was too much of a load for one man.”

  “I found it very—interesting,” Jack said.

  “Yes, well, take a few days to get your thoughts in order,” Halvorsham said. “Before you commit anything to paper, think it through carefully.”

  If that was not a barely veiled threat, Jack was no student of human communication. “I certainly will,” he said. “Indeed, I will.”

  It rained earlier, but wasn’t at the moment. There was no wind worth mentioning. The temp stood at 9C/48F degrees; pleasant enough for London in March.

  Jack emerged from the Slug and Lettuce pub in County Hall. The historic building was once the seat of local government but was now a Marriott hotel. The pub was part of a chain and catered to tourists instead of locals. The fish-and-chips were good and not too pricy.

  Jack was back in London. He always found the best way to reconnect with his adopted home city was to get out and walk in daylight. Since Lord Halvorsham “encouraged” him to recover from the trip to Israel, Jack took him at his word and opted for an hour stroll along the river followed by an hour lunch before taking the Tube back to work.

  From where Jack stood, transportation was a coin toss: back east to Waterloo Station or across Westminster Bridge to Westminster Station. Since the rain stopped Jack decided in favor of the views crossing the Thames.

  Strolling west along the bridge Jack faced the Houses of Parliament. On his right was the slowly revolving wheel of the London Eye. The chimes of Big Ben rang half past two.

  It was more difficult coming back to London this time than it had ever been. Before a year ago, previous trips abroad meant coming home to Debbie—now she wasn’t here. Walking around London during the last months was a way to grieve—to at least revisit places he and Deb had been together.

  Now part of Jack’s thoughts remained behind in Jerusalem. Jack didn’t like the feeling of being in a place he knew better than any big city in the world, and yet no longer sure he felt a part of it. It was—weird.

  He wondered again what Bette was doing. Given the time difference she was at work, he knew that. A couple recent phone calls were awkward. Bette was on another assignment; one she couldn’t talk about. And Jack could not say for certain when he’d be returning to Israel.

  Glancing at his watch, Jack decided he’d better pick up the pace. He wouldn’t make it back to his office before 3:15 as it was. Business at ECMP usually wrapped up around four, so he’d better hustle.

  A black, four-wheel-drive auto, traveling at a high rate of speed, barely made the corner onto the westbound side of the bridge, the side opposite Jack. “Too fast,” Jack muttered aloud. “Stupid.”

  A moment later as the Hyundai started swerving Jack revised his estimate. “Must be drunk.”

  Then it happened: the vehicle mounted the curb, striking pedestrians like nine-pins. One woman was tossed into the path of an oncoming bus. Another was flung over the railing into the river.

  As Jack watched in horror, the car jerked away from the sidewalk, then shot back into another knot of pedestrians, this time a group of school children.

  “God! Dear God!” Jack prayed aloud, breaking free from his trance and sprinting across the roadway toward the injured.

  There was a crash. The out-of-control car swerved yet again and collided with a barricade outside the Houses of Parliament.

  It was a scene from a horror movie. Victims were sprawled on the road, on the walkway, up against the railing. A woman was tossed in the air and lay beside a revolving stand displaying postcards of London.

  Jack knelt beside the first victim he came to. It was a schoolboy, thirteen or fourteen, Jack guessed. The boy moaned and clutched his arm. “Ça fait mal!” he said in French. “It hurts!” It was broken, but the only bleeding was from what appeared to be cuts and scratches. “It’ll be okay,” Jack said. “Tout ira bien, oui? Keep calm—uh, l’aide arrive.”

  He moved on to the next injury, just as someone at the Parliament end of the bridge shouted, “Watch out! He’s got a knife!”

  Not again! Jack thought. This can’t be happening again—not here. Not in the heart of London.

  But he knew it was terrorism.

  What could he do? There were victims everywhere! How could he protect any of them if a terrorist came back onto the bridge with a knife or gun—or another car?

  Screams erupted from inside the fence surrounding the Parliament driveway. How big was this attack? Were terrorists inside Parliament?

  Shots rang out—two, followed by one more, then momentary silence.

  A pair of police cars screamed onto the bridge.

  Jack went back to tending the wounded. There was a woman whose foot was crushed. She was shaking uncontrollably—going into shock. Stripping off his overcoat Jack tucked it around her. “Stay calm,” he said again. “Help is on the way.”

  When he reached another female victim two other Good Samaritans already knelt beside her. She was lying in a pool of blood. One of the volunteers looked up at Jack’s approach. “Can I help?” he asked.

  The man shook his head. “She’s gone.”

  Ambulances appeared, paramedic services, more police constables. A police helicopter arrived overhead. All of central London was awash in sirens.

  Jack looked at his watch again. Five minutes passed since the attack started. It felt like five hours.

  A glance in the bathroom mirror explained why people stared at him in horror on the taxi ride home from the bridge. His face was smeared with blood, his shirt and trousers spattered with gore from the victims. Jack stuffed his blood-soaked clothes and shoes into a black plastic trash bag and sealed the top with a twist tie.

  He turned the shower water on and stepped under the nozzle without waiting for it to warm. Red-dyed water flowed from his hair and swirled around his feet. A wave of nausea swept over him. His mouth was dry. He stepped out and retched into the toilet, rinsed his mouth, and resumed his shower. Scrubbing his hair twice, he squeezed his eyes shut, hoping the images of the day would disappear.

  Dressing in sweats, he carried the garbage bag downstairs and walked barefoot over the cobbles to a large dumpster at the end of the street.

  He shuddered, remembering again his vision of terror in London as he stood alone on Hungerford Bridge. Churches and synagogues in flames; tall buildings burning like torches. If the vision was true, there wa
s much more violence yet to come upon the great city. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe increased exponentially over the last year even as Christians were persecuted with a brutality unseen since the early Church. It was as though the demons of hell were loosed against Jews and Christians.

  He glanced up to see Debbie’s cat gazing serenely down at him from the neighbor’s upper story window. He remembered the dream of Debbie wrapping the battered shoebox in gold foil. A strange present. As if his mom’s old family photos were a gift for him.

  Making a cup of tea, he pondered the visions which came to him unbidden. Deb beneath the Christmas tree was the first of many. Nothing surprised him anymore.

  Was there something more to what he saw that night? He wondered where the shoebox was. His cousin sent it to him in London after his mother died. He scarcely looked at the old faded snapshots and placed it on the top shelf in the closet.

  Suddenly he felt desperate to look into it. Leaving his tea on the desk he hurried to the cupboard. Throwing down stacks of linens, he grasped the treasure and returned to his chair and cup of tea.

  Balancing the box on his knees, he lifted the lid. What was it Deb tried to tell him? There were neat stacks of pictures recording his childhood from infancy to college graduation. Photos of his parents’ courtship and wedding. A 5x7 of Jack in his high school wrestling singlet with an inscription on the back in his mother’s handwriting: “Our Jacob, wrestler of angels. . .”

  Jack smiled slightly as he came to an envelope with a letter and photo of his mother at age seven and Jack’s long dead grandmother, Rachael de Louzada. The little girl, clutching a teddy bear, squinted unhappily into the sun beside her dark-eyed, French mother. Something was scrawled in French on the back. “Reunis. 1946.”

  Reunited?

  Jack removed the letter from its yellowed envelope and began to read:

  My darling Jack. So many years have passed since the day this photograph was taken. My lifetime has passed. Since you are reading this, the cancer beat me, but I know you will feel my love for you. There is a story behind this picture which you have never known. I did not want you to grow up with the story of suffering. I thought until you were a man, the bitterness of life’s cruelty would make a shadow on your heart. Both your dad and I wanted only happiness for you. Never bitterness.

  This was taken in 1946, the day I was reunited with my mother after six years of separation because of the war. I have not told you before now, my mother and father were Sephardic Jews whose family escaped to France centuries before. When the Nazis came I was smuggled out of France at the age of one year and brought to America. My mother and father were left behind, arrested by the Nazis and transported to a concentration camp. My father Jacob did not survive. My mother survived. After the war we were reunited in America. I was a typical American child by then. I did not know my mother and though she tried, I could not accept her as my mother. I remained with my American family and was adopted. I told you that my mother passed away before you were born. Here is the truth: your grandmother immigrated to Israel in 1948. She hoped I would come to her one day but I did not. After a time, she gave up trying to contact me. This is my failure, not hers. But long ago I had to forgive the little girl who was me.

  Golden light from the afternoon fell on the photograph of Rachael de Louzada. Jack’s mom looked so much like her. Beautiful. Jack read the pain in Rachael’s eyes.

  The hope of reunion with a precious daughter she gave to the care of strangers.

  The teddy bear clutched in the arms of the little girl—a gift chosen in love and offered in hope.

  But the little girl had no love or longing to give her mother in return.

  So, in the end, Rachael de Louzada not only lost her husband, she lost the little girl whose life she fought so hard to save.

  “So,” Jack murmured. “I am Jacob. And I am Israel.”

  The television set mounted in the corner of the Warwick Castle pub replayed the attack over and over again. Local patrons watched the coverage as if spellbound. At the bar, they brooded over their pints and murmured threats against the Muslim population of London.

  Jack sat alone against the far wall beneath a framed etching of Warwick Castle. His supper of shepherd’s pie, bread, and Branston pickle was half eaten. He sipped his dark brown Newcastle Ale slowly. He stubbornly refused to look up at Sky News. The carnage of a minute and a half could not be changed; the lives lost without warning could never return.

  After the twentieth replay, he moved his meal to a picnic bench outside the pub to wait for Bette’s call from Tel Aviv. Someone left a copy of the Daily Mirror on the table. Jack refolded it with the front page inside so he wouldn’t have to see more gruesome images.

  On page three was the photograph of a prosperous-looking Arab man in a western business suit. The caption said his name was Brahim Rahman. The headline over the brief article stated: “Levantine Shipping Investigated for Money Laundering.”

  I’ve seen that guy, Jack thought, just as the phone rang. He tossed the paper aside.

  “This is Jack.”

  “Jack? Jack, your name came through headquarters as one of the people on the bridge.” Bette’s voice was shaken.

  “Yeah. It was pretty bad.”

  “You’re okay.”

  “I’m not hurt.”

  “Jack. . .” There was a long moment of silence. “When I saw your name. . .”

  “I’m okay, Bette. I—it was terrible. A few seconds of madness. And the whole world is turned upside down for so many. When I saw the knife attack in Jerusalem. . .”

  There was a pause while Jack recalled thinking how that victim could have been Bette. Shaking off the additional horror, Jack said, “I suddenly realized what Israel lives with—every day. Years on end. And now it’s here too.”

  Bette cleared the emotion from her voice. “Nothing is certain in life. Ask a Jew in Jerusalem. We don’t part from one another without saying, ‘I love you.’ When are you coming back?”

  “Soon, I hope. Bette—so much I want to tell you. So much has happened. I need your help. I need to find someone in Israel—she would be very old now.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She immigrated to Israel in 1948. She was a survivor of some Nazi extermination camp. I found a letter about her from my mother.”

  “Yes? Just a minute, let me write down her name.”

  “Rachael de Louzada. Transported from France early in the war. Her husband didn’t survive. Jacob de Louzada. And she might be dead by now. But the last anyone heard of her she was in Israel.”

  Silence as Bette wrote down the names. “Sure. I’ll pass it along. Who was she?”

  Jack rubbed his forehead. He had not realized how badly his head ached until now. “She is my grandmother. . .”

  The staff room at ECMP headquarters was very utilitarian: plain tile counters, round tables with plastic chairs, refrigerator, and coffee maker—no windows. Therefore, it was not popular with the staff. Their offices were more comfortable. Group conversations were not encouraged at ECMP.

  Today, however, the room was packed, because it did possess a television. Even though it was only a couple days later and there was hardly anything new to report, all the British and foreign news services were providing continuous updates on the Westminster Bridge attack.

  “To recap: Five dead, including the killer,” the broadcaster intoned. “Fifty people hurt, some of them seriously.”

  Amateur video and still shots of the tragedy surfaced: a woman being thrown under the wheels of a bus, another victim flung over the railing toward the river, the Hyundai diving in and out of the crowds on the bridge like an attacking wolf harrying a flock of sheep.

  The form of the unarmed police constable who tried to intervene, stabbed to death, lying in a pool of blood.

  Even though Jack tried to keep it secret, word somehow got out that he was a witness to the attack. Now every new horror—every additional gruesome detail—caused co-workers to as
k: “Did you see that happen?”

  Other than admitting he was on the bridge and tried to help some of the injured, Jack said nothing about what he witnessed. The visions were too real; too nauseating. The less time spent reliving them the better.

  Jack filled his Ronald Reagan coffee mug—the one Debbie gave him; the one carrying the motto “Trust but Verify.” He prepared to retreat to his office. Someone called out, “They’re about to release the nationalities.”

  The murmured conversations ceased. Additional graphic bars of the sound control appeared on the screen as the volume was run up on the set.

  “Besides three innocent British victims,” the announcer’s voice now boomed, reverberating throughout the lunch room and down the halls, “an American is also dead. Many victims remain in the hospital in critical condition. The injured include visitors from France, Romania, Korea, Germany, Greece, Poland, Ireland, Australia, Italy, and China. Still others remain unconfirmed.”

  “Like a roll call at the United Nations,” someone said loudly.

  “Shh!” another worker urged.

  Just nations were named—as if the identities of those whose lives were disrupted or completely destroyed were only figureheads, standing in for their countries. What did family members think when they heard their loved ones rattled off like the verses of a Christmas carol: “Three French hens, two Italian children, and a dead Romanian”?

  The specter of terrorism was worldwide, Jack acknowledged. If it could strike innocent civilians in the heart of London—and thereby maim or kill people from a dozen nations—nowhere was safe. Terrorism was now the whole world’s problem, whether the world was ready to admit that fact or not.

  “It is now known the attacker’s name was Khalid Masood,” the announcer boomed. “He was British, born Adrian Elms, but took the name Khalid when he converted to Islam in 2005. He has also gone by the name Khalid Choudry. Police sources say Masood was not previously being tracked as dangerous.