Curiously, his father sat in the midst of the storm unperturbed, as if enclosed in his own ark. And the others always made way for him, deferred to him, called him the Sheikh—but, strangely, never asked his opinion; and he never offered it. He sat quietly and smoked, drinking slowly cup after cup of Turkish coffee, occasionally flinging a disapproving stare at the debaters if the fury rose too high. There would be an immediate calm.
One night he had become restless and whispered to his father. “They argue and argue but do nothing.” The Sheikh had looked down and murmured: “They are paralyzed.” And then, “It is as God wills.”
Later he had played with the boys in the streets of the Old City, just a short walk from his own house. He and his friends would climb up the wall of the city, run ahead of the tourists, block the exit gates and demand American money to open them. The incomprehensibly foolish tourists—he could see their fat, distorted faces, their fear at being trapped behind the gates. It was a way of teasing the dajjal. His father was angry when he found out about it.
Still later the games got worse, until one day he followed the older boys to a mechanic’s shop in the valley. Inside the corroded garage they worked on a rich Arab’s car. Still little, he was the one to climb under the man’s car and attach a squat, round metal object to the chassis. When the owner, a big shopkeeper from the Old City, claimed the car, he tossed a tip to the little boy and drove away. He barely noticed the white Mini that followed the man up the road toward the western part of town. He did not hear the explosion of the man’s car, detonated remotely when he reached a certain crowded intersection, and did not know until much later about the street made red with ragged, blasted limbs and unidentifiable masses of flesh.
When the Israeli police finished with his friends, they were different. He began to understand the paralysis, the grotesque sickness that obsessed and aged them. One day, a few years later, he realized what it was he had attached to the man’s car. It was not that someone told him; rather, it was a connection his boy’s mind hadn’t made until one day he saw a bloody wreck in the street. The washing before prayer became suddenly important to him. And it was about then his watchful father took him to the Holy Places, where as they washed together late one afternoon the Sheikh had quietly explained the mission.
Now on this stifling morning he looked back down into the old lavatory of gray marble and rust. One old man was slowly washing his feet for prayer. Here his father had told him about the cleansing to come and his part in it, about the Holy Places, about the power of the dajjal. A curious quiet had come over him after that. Al-Nakba, which obsessed everyone around him, was to him like a rock in the rapids, to be navigated carefully and ultimately cleared, but it was not the end of the current of history.
The Sheikh had continued to teach him, along with some of the Brothers. He went to no school; his education was pure and superb and rich with books. Every year he had learned more about the mission, while his friends grew sicker, while the walls of Israel rose around his people. A sullen status quo had gradually taken hold of the Holy Land; the Palestinian flag faded overhead but it flew, and the organism of refugee camps and small towns that it represented slowly fossilized under the pressure of a permanent and wearing tension. The Sheikh encouraged him to get training. Mirroring the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority had built up an elite police force that cooperated nominally with them but might as well have functioned in another universe. He had qualified for it easily.
By now the worshipers had dispersed, fleeing the sun and getting to work, so his footsteps echoed in solitary across the stones of the plaza. He wanted to look into the Qubbet as-Sakra—the Dome of the Rock. He walked past the unobtrusive black pillars that protruded from the ground and marked the perimeter of the new security system—an electron beam that almost magically detected any sort of weapon. At night a curtain of the faintest purple light flickered from one pillar to another; in the daytime there was nothing. Still, he imagined he felt a minute shock to his skin as he passed through it.
The Qubbet was blindingly dim inside, as if to echo the miracle of the lightning horse, al-Buraq, which had brought the Prophet to this spot. Gradually, like waves in the sea, the gray, billowing rock came into focus, the rock imprinted by the Prophet’s foot when he vaulted to Allah’s presence. For the Jews and Christians, it was the altar on which Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, Isaac, and where Solomon built the Holy of Holies for his temple.
He had been told that his facility with English, along with his education, had brought him into the most select part of the service—a small group trained to settle the religious nerves of his people, to keep watch on this Holy Rock. He understood better than most the atomic potential of this stone, the vortex of three great gods—Muslim, Jewish, and Christian. In the Holy Places were the unrealized dreams of the cosmos, and the hour of their realization was near. For the Muslims, reconquest of the Holy Mount; for the Jews, their long-awaited redemption and the restored Temple; for the Christians, the return of the Messiah.
The assignment dovetailed perfectly with the mission—at least, as much as he understood of it. It enabled a thorough knowledge of the security arrangements for the Holy Places. This knowledge, the Sheikh had told him, was crucial to his future; he was given to understand that his assignment to this service was no coincidence. It had something to do with the new golden ring on his hand.
So, when he was in the city, he prayed daily at Al-Aqsa. He had come to know the Waqf, the Islamic trustees of the Mount. He knew their zeal and determination, as well as their undoubted blind spots. It was those blind spots that preoccupied him the most.
Everyone who entered the Mount was carefully vetted. A few select tourist groups were allowed each day, but arrangements were purposely difficult to make. Worshipers were screened. And now there was this new security system unlike any elsewhere in the world. Flaming Sword, it was called. And it was needed. Still, it would take only one slip, one less-than-vigilant Waqf guard…
He knew that there were radical Jews who wanted to see the Qubbet as-Sakra and Al-Aqsa destroyed, who believed that as long as the Muslim shrines remained on the Mount and the Third Temple remained unbuilt, their Messiah could not come. And there were fundamentalist Christians who saw things the same way. Years before, a young Australian Christian had tried to burn down Al-Aqsa with a match and a petrol-soaked handkerchief—the building was saved, the Australian went to a mental hospital, and the Messiah had not come.
Paradoxically, as he also knew, certain Muslims would secretly welcome attacks on the mosques because of the inevitable conflagration that would follow. They believed the Muslim world would then rise from its torpor and drive the Zionists into the sea. Thousands would die gladly, so long as they could take one Jew with them. The holy city would be cleansed in blood. As for the shrines, they could be rebuilt.
Unusually, the Israeli and Palestinian authorities saw eye-to-eye on the issue—these extremists were mad, unbalanced minds, pathetic religious cranks. When an occasional attack was attempted for the purpose of bringing on the Apocalypse, the government locked the perpetrators up in asylums or deported them. But he knew they were not all mad. It was the intense logic of hope that drove them.
It was getting hotter. He looked at his watch and realized it was nearly time. He walked down the stairs to the Sunset Gate, the entrance and the exit of the Holy Mount. The attack on Al-Aqsa had damaged a nerve; the Waqf guard on duty at the gate examined his papers just as thoroughly and suspiciously as when he had entered an hour or so before. He walked down the ramp and paused where he could see the Jews at their morning prayer at the Western Wall, the men in white shawls on one side of the square and the women in patchy colors on the other, clustering like ants in the shadow. It was one of the holiest days of the year for them, and it would be a seething, hot one.
Beyond them, a crowd of early tourists drifted like sheep up the ramp to the Temple Mount and too
k photos over the barrier put in place to isolate the worshipers. The sightseers looked on uncomprehending, he noted grimly to himself, with the dajjal, unseen, breathing at their backs.
The Western Wall, Old City, Jerusalem, 0730h
Catriel Levine helped her tottering father across the bridge to the fence surrounding the Western Wall. The two security guards accompanying them looked unhappily at the crowd in the square and stiffened as a lean man in black, clearly Palestinian, passed them on the bridge and tossed the butt-end of a cigarette over the side. Catriel only glanced at the man. When they arrived at the gate of the Kotel, the worship area, his friends the Halevys were waiting for them. The Halevys looked like farmers off the kibbutz, he in sandy denim and his wife in an old gray bag of a dress, although Jules Halevy had been before his retirement a distinguished physicist. Catriel helped her father extract his prayer shawl and phylacteries from their blue velvet sack and waited by the gate while Halevy went with him down the cobblestones to the wall. The two guards stood by quietly.
Catriel watched her father among the worshipers as he leaned against the wall and carefully inserted a small paper—a prayer for her dead uncle—into the cracks between the giant blocks that once formed the foundation of Herod’s Temple. He and Jules Halevy then disappeared under their shawls and began the morning prayers.
She walked with Rachel Halevy past the gate into the women’s worship area. It was separated from the men by a high curtain. This morning Catriel wore no makeup, no jewelry—only a plain dress and shoes. The shadow of the wall was cool after the early morning sun. A few plaintive women huddled at the wall, far fewer than the noisy men on the other side of the curtain. She imagined she could hear the squeal of Halevy’s high trumpet-like voice.
Despite the heat, the stone that she touched was cold to her. She had not cried in years and was not going to cry now, regardless of the loss and the disgust she felt. She had wanted to tear the paper in pieces rather than to see her father tender it to these stones.
Her uncle had betrayed them, had nearly ruined them. And her father…he had been so foolish—unimaginably foolish—to trust him as far as he did. But then, it had only recently become clear how far her uncle would go, how far he had already gone.
Her own people could not be trusted; this was an old reality, and she shouldn’t have been shaken by it. She grasped the stone block before her, a wedge of humiliation in her heart at the thought of her people cringing and crying at a basement wall year after year while the Muslim abominations above their heads profaned the site of the house of God. But it was what they deserved, she told herself. They could have taken the Temple Mount in 1948, when Am Israel was founded. Again, they could have taken it back in 1967 when Israeli soldiers stood on top of this hill and a rabbi sounded the shofar for the first time since Bar Kokhba eighteen hundred years before. God had freely restored their holy place to them; yet they threw it in His face, handing the keys to the Temple Mount back to the Muslim rabble who held them now.
And the Messiah would have come long before this.
Without the temple, there could be no Messiah—her father and uncle had taught her this from her earliest days. The two brothers had come from Russia to help build the temple. They had married beautiful Jewish women, had studied at the finest university in the country, had dedicated their lives to bringing the kingdom of the Messiah. As a child she had ridden her uncle’s shoulders while the whole family marched with the faithful who demanded the right to pray on the Temple Mount. When just a little girl, she had kissed the cornerstone of the temple to be placed on the Mount, had seen the stone anointed and carried to the Sunset Gate. But the police had blocked them, sent them back—their own police, with the Shield of David shining blue on their shoulders, forbidding them entry to the Hill of David. Jews were permitted to pray on the Mount in small groups for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, if they chose. Catriel herself had never in her life stood on the holy ground.
And now the family too was riven, reduced to dust. Her mother divorced; her aunt dead of miscarriage; leaving only herself, her father, and her uncle, who had now also severed himself from them.
After the divorce, on her visits to her father, he had quietly read Torah and Talmud with her and she had fallen in love with the law. It recalled for her the splendid God she had believed in as a child. Her Orthodox mother opposed Talmud study for a girl, so she grew up as a polite rebel against her authority. As soon as she was old enough, Catriel was in the Israeli army reading law books between machine gun drills, and eventually made her way to an American university to read the law of patents and copyrights.
“Are you praying, Casha?” It was the high, woody voice of Rachel, who saw herself as a replacement for Catriel’s disapproving mother, which was occasionally convenient if not irritating. Rachel and Jules were her father’s oldest friends and had kept him close to the movement even when his work overwhelmed everything else in his life. In a way, Rachel was her real mother; the firmness in that husky, ropy face stood for the steady hope, ha-tikvah, the promise that the people would be redeemed. Catriel, defiant and cool, believed in that face if she believed in anything.
“No,” she answered shortly. “I’m not praying.”
“Not for your uncle?”
“Certainly not.”
“And not for the Messiah to come?”
“Why should I? He hasn’t come and he won’t come.”
Catriel looked up at her. Rachel Halevy’s face was just as firm as before.
Fifty meters away, behind the barrier that set off the worship area, Efrem Sefardi sat on a bench in place for the holy days. Aimlessly, he looked at a newspanel between glances at the crowd. Men lounged and drank coffee on the big green wooden benches around him, early tourists meandered past. A practiced nonentity in his almost colorless shirt and trousers, Toad kept an unobtrusive watch on Catriel Levine.
It was almost time for the rally of the Mishmar, the little group of religious militants that Emmanuel Shor had led. Toad had found out all about them. They were a fitfully organized collection of kibbutz radicals and former West Bank settlers, along with a handful of religious cranks who moved from one apocalyptic faction to another. For years, the more resolute members of the Mishmar had collected at the square several times a year to march on the Sunset Gate and make their symbolic demand of the return of the Temple Mount to the Jewish people. They were only one of several such groups.
The square was full of police in anticipation of the march, and not all in uniform—Toad knew how to recognize them. One small group of bullnecked men in open shirts pretended to argue over a business deal—they were from another division of Shin Bet—and several plainclothes people stood listlessly around the perimeter of the plaza. The government wanted no trouble flaring up in the heated atmosphere following the attacks on the shrines.
Miner’s voice suddenly hissed into the little telecom piece he wore in his ear. “Boqer tov. Heard anything from Ari?”
“Nothing. Last I heard he was chasing the ring.”
“You know Orthodox Jews don’t usually wear rings.”
“Yes. So, have you found out why our corpse was wearing one?”
“I was thinking it might have something to do with the Mishmar. You don’t see a crowd of fanatics wearing engraved golden rings ganging up to charge Al-Aqsa, do you?”
“No, not from my vantage point. But there’s nothing to see yet.”
“Not the superb Catriel Levine?”
“Yes, she’s here, but not so superb this morning. She’s still dressed for a funeral. Also, it looks like her father’s decided to join the party.”
“Not quite the zealot Emmanuel was. I have connected with his accounts—Shor put nearly all his income into the Mishmar. He funded most of its activities. He and this Halevy were the biggest noises in the group. Now I guess Halevy is the top man.”
“Y
es, and here he comes. It looks like things are getting under way.”
Toad rang off. Along with Levinsky’s bodyguards, a frayed-looking little group of people were following Jules Halevy and Levinsky, still in their prayer shawls, from the worship area across the cobblestones toward the entrance to the Temple Mount bridge. Nervously, they stopped to talk only a few meters away from Toad. He looked at the time—it was nearly eight o’clock—and obliquely snapped photos of the group with his GeM at the same time.
Catriel Levine and Rachel Halevy climbed up from the women’s area and joined the little march toward the Sunset Gate, where they were met by a pair of portly Waqf guards and two uniformed Jerusalem police. The plaza stirred as the marchers spread out over their heads an unusual flag embroidered with a great golden image of Solomon’s Temple.
This is how it will start, Toad thought. Like the dodgy firecrackers he had watched other children play with when he was a child—they could blow your hands off. A party of Jews with more religion than sense will break into the Mount and go on a rampage. Or they’ll start shooting or try to get around the system and toss a firebomb on the Dome of the Rock. And then the whole Muslim world will descend on us like locusts out of the Bible. He knew that the Shin Bet were not the only ones watching this morning—there was that Palestinian in black clothes standing in a corner a few meters away, smoking in the shade, keeping an obviously trained eye on this dangerous little demonstration.
Abruptly, the cameras came out: it was the media. Al-Jazeera, CNN, the satellite networks that loved this sort of thing. Turning almost on cue, Jules Halevy grinned angrily at them, indignation gleaming across his face, and he began to talk about the Mount in rapid tones into the cameras.
All at once there was a shout. One of the Waqf men pushed Rachel Halevy back; Catriel stepped firmly up and began telling the man in what Toad had no doubt was her best lawyer’s voice what was what. The camera operators were delighted. From where Toad sat he could see that Nathan Levinsky looked frightened—things were getting out of hand. But then the two Israeli police smiled and held their hands palms up at the marchers; it was getting hot, and it was clearly time to go home and cool off.
The Day of Atonement Page 19