The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  Ari smiled at a ceremonial picture of stout Mortimer as Grand Chancellor, in flowing red robes with a massive forked cross hung around his neck. The title sounded much grander than it was. Apparently, the chancellor was like a foreign minister; Ari tried to imagine what kind of foreign ministry would be needed by a nation that consisted of one building. Mortimer had served a few years with the Knights and then retired and disappeared from the Internet. There were no recent references. Evidently Mortimer had settled for this quiet routine of “reading the cathedral” and mystifying the tourists.

  Just then he heard a tapping on glass and looked over his shoulder at Maryse smiling down at him through the window. Next to her Mortimer smiled even more broadly, motioning him to come up, elevating in one hand a vaporous cup of coffee. A solid citizen, Ari thought. Still, with so many hints and clues hanging in the haze about him, the man dissolved into echoes.

  Salah-eddin Street, Jerusalem, 0900h

  “As-salaam aleykum, Sheikh.”

  “Aleykum-salaam,” replied Hafiz as he entered the swordsmith’s shop. The smith saluted Hafiz with arms and hands baked with grime. He had been banging his hammer on a crooked dagger blade to straighten it; he still used an antique furnace in the corner to warm the metal. Now he put the dagger away and bowed to Hafiz.

  “Harun, my friend. Is my sword ready?”

  The smith smiled through his black lips and nodded as he poured coffee into two tiny cups from a pot heating on the corner of the furnace. “It is. A privilege to work with so fine a sword.” He presented a cup to Hafiz and then unlocked a cabinet from which he pulled out the tapestry roll.

  Hafiz sipped his coffee, stood, and removed the sword from its covering. The smith admired the blade as Hafiz held it up shakily to inspect it.

  “Finest Indian steel. At least 500 years old. And here…” the smith traced with his knobby finger a stain like lightning that climbed the blade. “The ladder of Mohammed, peace be upon him.”

  Hafiz knew that the ancient steel contained impurities that had produced the ladder-like imprint when the sword was first forged. But still he saw in it the image of the Prophet ascending to heaven. He bent the sword nearly in half; it sprang back. He struck the sword lightly against the smith’s workbench to hear it ring. The resonance of it filled the little shop.

  They both smiled, and Hafiz rolled the sword back into its carpet and laid it in a long black bag he had brought for this purpose. He paid the man and started his slow walk up the street to his own house.

  It was devilishly hot. “On that day the sky shall be as molten brass,” Hafiz recited in his mind, “and the mountains like woolen tinder.” The Harb—the westerners—had done something to the weather; they had banished the clouds and the cool of autumn with so much burning of oil for so long. Perhaps it was a sign that the day was approaching.

  He stopped and coughed very hard. There had been more specks of blood in his white basin that morning; after that he could eat no breakfast. He felt the weight of the black bag in his hand and was glad that he had a son to do what had to be done. The son he and Jamila had adopted from the orphanage in Lebanon. Now after thirty years he would follow Jamila, bearing in his lungs what she had borne. It was only right.

  Mostly he remembered hospital, the face of Jamila like the ash of a fire, her breathing blocked, dark water flowing from tubes in her lungs, a frail enervating smile. A disdainful nurse stood by as she died, watching him as if the death were his fault. From that day Hafiz lived for the little boy Nasir, teaching him about his future, monitoring him from remote places as he learned hard things about the life around him. Things Hafiz had learned, too, but without the guidance that Nasir enjoyed. Unlike Nasir, Hafiz had followed a path to near ruin, so he thanked God that guidance had eventually come.

  What he had learned from his own father was how to mourn. In the camp his father had sat alone, day after day, staring at the ground. They had taken his home, his business, left him with nothing. The pain had driven Hafiz into the streets. He had abandoned school, gone masked against the IDF when he was barely fifteen, had learned to fire a Russian machine gun even though it was only into the air. He had cheered when the Zionist athletes died in Munich. He believed it made the rest of the world suffer as his own family had suffered.

  Then his uncle Haytham, who had not lived in the land since before al-Nakba, came to the camp. His father had never told him about an older brother, and Haytham and his father had nothing to say to each other. Haytham told Hafiz stories he had never heard about his family, about the Al-Azhar University at Cairo the brothers had both attended, about his father’s law degree, about the prosperous life they had enjoyed. Haytham pleaded with Hafiz not to sacrifice his life to mourning and ruin. He said that the Zionists had given them money to leave their houses, but that his father had not wanted peace with them. So Haytham had taken the money and gone to Western universities, had become a respected scholar.

  What Haytham didn’t say was perhaps more important; he told Hafiz there were things he couldn’t tell him, things that would change his life one day but that could not yet be shared. One day after sitting in silence for hours next to his younger brother, Haytham took Hafiz for a walk to a place overlooking the sea. A day of requital was coming, Haytham whispered to him, and he—Hafiz—would play a fundamental role in it. What that role would be, he would know someday. But for now, he needed to calm himself, to bend compliantly like Damascus steel until he could be vested with what belonged to him by right.

  But then came the great betrayal by Egypt in the 1970s. “Peace,” everyone said; but for Hafiz it was bitterness. And when the revolution began in Iran, Hafiz joined. He told no one in the family he was going. He remembered the long trip over land to Tehran, the nights of driving through desert in an old car with his friends from the camp, all of them going to fight for the new Islamic nation. He remembered being unable to see the road under the moon, but somehow they found their way.

  But what he experienced with the Mujahedin was not right. At first he understood nothing. Their language, their faces, even their Islam was strange to him. And there were things he could not bear to watch.

  They went through a rough sort of combat training in the public park by day and at night walked the streets filled with undirected anger. They found a woman getting out of a car. She had paint on her face like a Jewish woman and wore no robes over her hair and her dress. The dress was black with blood when they finished hitting her against the car.

  That night in a public bathroom he had seen himself in a soiled mirror and couldn’t tell his own face from the dirt.

  Weeks later winter came. He had never felt cold before, and he sat alone, thinking about the woman, hugging himself to stay warm next to a coffee stand in the street when Haytham put his hand on his shoulder. His uncle had come out of nowhere, dressed oddly in a heavy coat, a round hat on his head like the ones the imams wore, bearded like a prophet. For years after that he could not guess how Haytham found him. He had smiled at Hafiz and bought him a cup of coffee that was like hot mud, but he remembered the delicious warmth in his throat.

  After that it took little for his uncle to convince Hafiz to return to Palestine. He went willingly and submitted himself to Haytham’s wishes. He went back to the school he had abandoned and for the first time began to study seriously the holy book. Here, back in his home by the warm sea, he learned to love the words and the feel of the parchment under his fingers. The Koran became a refuge from the anger that surrounded him; where others spat out sacred verses as if they were weapons, Hafiz found mercy in them.

  He took the book at its word. The words of the book settled like wings over his mind. There would be mercy for the penitent. It was a simple assurance that eventually soothed the rage he had felt. But still he knew that a day of requital was coming, and if it was coming for the laughing Jewish children he saw on the beach, or for the soft-faced Christian ladie
s from America smiling at him out the windows of a tour bus, it was certainly coming for the killers of women. The memory of it filled him with tension; at times in the night he clutched at his own heart to think of it.

  The students around him were uneasy with him. He learned huge passages of the Koran by heart and could cite blessings to counter any of the curses they threw out at the Harb and the Zionists. His uncle sat with Hafiz for hours sipping tea while he recited effortlessly chapter after chapter of the holy book; on Fridays they went to the mosque together and Haytham would ask the young man to astonish the elders there with his facility. And when they learned that his name was Hafiz al-Ayoub they would nod contemplatively at heaven.

  When his uncle took him to Cairo for a visit, Hafiz suspected he would be asked to show off to Haytham’s prestigious friends; instead they went the rounds of the university. Before he had a chance to think about it, Hafiz was enrolled and reading—at his uncle’s expense—theology and law and living in a rooftop flat like an eyrie furnished with silken rugs. He remembered the view from the window. In the evening he would sit perched over the city the color of dry earth, looking toward the mosque and reciting his lessons while the orange sunlight drained away into layers of dust. He wondered why life could not be always learning and discussing the words of God and the poetry of the sages.

  Haytham visited often. Once he gave him a book of poems in Persian and he found that he could understand it. In his short time at Tehran the language had attached itself to him like an irritating new friend. So he began to study other languages. He found himself in the book shops of the souk, buying books of poetry in many languages, sounding out strange words in Greek, Russian, and French. To him it was all music; he did not need to understand the words because of the pure delight of the sound—even the Hebrew, which strongly echoed his own Arabic tongue.

  The life of the university, a thousand years old, entered his to a point where he could not conceive of leaving it; that is, until his uncle visited him one night and gently announced to him that it was time to settle accounts.

  Since then, the sword he now carried had been the center of his life. Now, after the ceremony on Thursday, it would be the center of his son’s life. Nasir had returned very late the night before; Hafiz hoped that he had not taken some misstep. He lifted the black bag into the entry of his house and looked behind him before closing the door. The portly Israeli who had been watching the house was gone.

  Lion Gate Street, Jerusalem, 0930h

  Toad leaned against a pole and assessed the little shop a few meters away. It was like any one of a hundred such shops along these lanes of the Old City that were visited only by tourists looking for souvenirs—although this shop, pushed to the edges of the quarter, looked especially pitiful. An old American couple, a dazed man in baggy shorts and his brittle wife, edged warily along the displays of olive wood and cheap brass, ignoring one other. Only these elderly tourists came out in the early hours; it was a way of avoiding the heat and themselves. Toad wondered how married people found each other in the first place, as so many of them seemed to lose each other in time.

  The shopkeepers stood in front of their stores, just inside the line of shade their awnings created on the cobblestones. They occasionally called without energy to the passing tourists, obviously little interested in making any sales, exhausted from years of bargaining with Americans who would go home to brag to their friends about how little they paid for the “unique” olivewood Nativity they bought in Jerusalem.

  Toad watched one vendor who was just pushing open the rusty shutter that covered the entrance to his shop. He was a large, uneasy man already sweating in the morning heat. Toad knew all about him, his name, address, family connections, bank records—everything but what really mattered. The shutter open, the shopkeeper hesitated for a moment, looking into his souk as if it were a dark, unknown cave, and then slowly walked in.

  The night before had been just as Kristall wanted it: no sign of the police, no trace of official activity anywhere near the shop. Along with a technician and two muscular Shin Bet men, Toad had taken position inside a rusty grocery van parked halfway down the lane a couple of hours before Talal Bukmun was supposed to show up. For a few blocks around, plain clothes police ringed the area along with the usual military patrol. Inside the van, the technician pointed a high-gain microphone directly at the little shop. And then they had all waited.

  Through his earphones, Toad could hear with fine precision wisps of wind, unaccountable sweeps and taps, and the occasional scuff from the shoes of a passerby. Through his night glasses he could see everything as if it were bright day. Despite all this he had seen and heard little.

  Just at eight o’clock Nasir al-Ayoub, in black turtleneck and coat and black trousers, had walked alone around the corner and toward the souk. Toad knew him immediately. He had closely examined the man’s photo and recognized him as the Palestinian policeman he had seen earlier in the day watching the demonstration at the Temple Mount. He also noted the slack place in the leather jacket that indicated an automatic weapon, roughly standard issue. Toad had snapped on his lens camera as Ayoub approached the shop. After examining the shutter for a moment, Ayoub had found that one of the panels was loose and slipped inside.

  Toad clearly heard the man’s footsteps—and only his. A faint light had come on, probably from Ayoub’s torch. There was silence. After five long minutes, Ayoub re-emerged into the lane and looked around, lit and smoked a cigarette—Toad heard the click of the lighter—and finally put it out on the ground. Pulling a GeM from his coat, he inspected it for a few minutes, then turned and fingered the street number painted on the shutter. After that he leaned against it and remained still until precisely 20:30, when he walked back up the lane and around the corner. Toad quietly issued an order to the ring of police to watch him but not to make contact

  Impatient, the Shin Bet men wanted to have a look inside the souk, but Toad sat motionless in the van for another half hour, listening and watching and mulling over what had happened—or what had apparently not happened. At last he climbed out and made his way slowly up the lane with his men following. He waved them away from the loose shutter and shone a torch inside; he wanted no one to disturb the scene. But there had been nothing to see—only racks of postcards, key chains; piles of souvenir shirts and hats; a tarnished brass menorah atop a small hill of baked-clay oil lamps. Everything ordinary, everything usual.

  Kristall had been furious. She had watched the entire operation from her lair in Queen Helena Street and concluded that her own people had somehow scared Bukmun away. It was unfair of her, but then she was desperately tense and tired. For his part, Toad had gone home to bed and to wait for daylight.

  When he awoke in the dark, he tried to put his theories of the night’s activities out of his mind and concentrate only on what he had seen and heard. Two or three people had passed down the lane; otherwise, it had been deserted before Ayoub appeared. No one had gone in through the back of the shop—police had watched it closely, and in any case there was no entry. After the owner had shut everything, for two hours before and a half hour after 8 o’clock, no one had gone in or out of the souk; and Ayoub had given every indication of waiting for someone who had never shown up. All of this was obvious; the trap had failed and a close watch was put on Ayoub.

  But what wasn’t obvious? Toad still lay in bed, put on his GeM earphones, and tapped the recording the technician had downloaded to him. Silence and vague static nearly put him back to sleep. Then he heard again a tiny piece of paper, a wrapper of some sort, skittering over the cobblestones ahead of the breeze that came at sunset. He remembered it. More silence, followed by what sounded like the short, abrupt sweep of a broom, and then a tap. A dull tap, as if a raindrop had struck the tile roof of the shop. After that, a long, slow sweeping noise.

  Toad listened over and over again, dozing and suddenly waking as heard once again the rasp of the paper
and the almost inaudible tap. At last he got up, made a phone call, dressed, and took the bus for the Old City.

  Daylight would not really penetrate the souk until later in the afternoon, but Toad didn’t want or need to wait that long. He sauntered up the lane, occasionally stopped and fingered postcards on the outdoor stands, glancing over the layout of the shops he passed. When he arrived at the little souk the shopkeeper ignored him—the man was reading the news on his tablet and having his morning smoke, looking a good deal more relaxed than when he had opened the shutter.

  It looked as it had the night before, although now Toad could see the fine dust that covered the merchandise, the walls, and the floor—clearly it wasn’t much of an enterprise. He took a few slow steps into the back of the shop, taking care not to touch anything, then stood perfectly quiet, hands in pockets, examining much more than the clutter on the tables. He knew he could have stayed there all day; the shopkeeper, if anything, was more insensible of his presence than ever.

  The dust was not spread uniformly across the floor. Footprints showed quite clearly—probably Ayoub’s from the night before, as Toad knew that no customers had entered the shop that morning and the owner had stayed behind the cash drawer since opening up. But in one corner something had made a long, wide swath in the dust, as if someone had rolled a carpet over the floor and taken it up again. His eyes followed the mark to a horizontal cabinet in the wall, hidden under a parapet piled with mass-produced Orthodox icons of a shaggy John the Baptist and bearded saints, Moses and Elijah and Saint Paul. The cabinet door was a bit more than a meter in width.

  From where he stood, he could see the boundary of the mark in the dust. An idea was beginning to form, and he abruptly stepped to the side of the cabinet door so he could see the room from that vantage. The shopkeeper looked up, saw Toad examining a particularly garish golden icon of the Christ that hung above his storage cabinet, and went back to his reading. Toad slowly turned around.