“Nothing is left but to raise up the humble and to humiliate those who are raised up…
iniquitatem, iniquitatem, iniquitatem ponam eam,
“I will overwhelm, overwhelm, overwhelm it…
et hoc nunc factum est,
“And it will be worn no longer…
donec veniret cuius est iudicium et tradam ei.
“Until He shall come whose right it is, and I shall give it to him.”
Ari shook his head and sat down on one of the desk chairs. “So this inscription—this dvcei—is shorthand for something marked in that Bible. And you knew what we were looking for.” He turned and glared at Mortimer.
“I knew Maryse would eventually decipher it,” Mortimer replied simply.
“It’s more than that,” Maryse replied. “This passage is a continuation of the note that was found on Chandos.”
Ari jumped in. “And I’d like to know why our friend here was so determined to own this particular marked-up Bible and this card.” Ari looked hard again at Mortimer, who gave him a broad grin and a shrug.
“These items had been taken from my Order,” Mortimer spread his hands.
“Then it’s your Order I want to know about. What’s the connection between this motto of the Order of Malta and two otherwise totally unconnected murders.”
Mortimer replied quietly, pointing to the tarot card, “That is not the motto of the Order of Malta.”
“Then what does any of this mean?” Ari stood and faced him. “That Chandos thought the Pope was a traitor to Christianity and got angry enough to bring him down? That by sheer coincidence he wore a ring with this motto inscribed on it?”
Mortimer added another query: “And why is a dead Israeli scientist found wearing the same ring?”
Ari stared at Mortimer, who was playing idly with the tarot card. He had not wanted the old man to know about Shor, but Maryse had obviously told him.
“Ari, this passage is from the Hebrew scriptures,” Maryse said. “This is the book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Aren’t the Jews also awaiting the One to come, the One whose right it is to rule?”
“The Messiah.”
“Yes. Who will come at the end of the world.”
“But not the Christian Messiah. Not the Messiah of Chandos.”
“The difference between us is that you believe the Messiah has yet to come, and we believe he has yet to come for the second time. For both of us, his coming signifies the end of the world.”
Irritated, Ari dusted himself off. “I suppose on Monday we’ll find out who’s right.”
“What?” Maryse looked sharply at him.
“Some kid—in the cathedral—he told me the world would end on Monday. He said that’s why he was in church.” Ari gave a harsh laugh.
Mortimer’s laugh echoed his. “Quite right, too. The world will end on Monday.”
Antonine Study House, Rome, 0940h
Fatima could not remember ever being so cold. The walls of the house were sweating with the cold, and the dim morning light hung like frozen haze in the air.
Her carryall was ready for her flight home and had been for two days. She had spent those days studying her lessons, pushing her mind through the initial exercises for becoming an Antonine, trying her hardest to stay awake and not dream. It was the natural choice, needed no consideration at all. Her mother-in-law had an undeniable claim on her, and the sisters would be caring for her now—what else could she do?
“Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee.…”
Besides, it would be simple, quiet work, and after the intricate shock of Saturday she needed simplicity more than anything. She felt deafened by her own mind. She had scourged her memory for signs, for hints—for anything Peter had said or done that might have prepared her for this. But there was nothing. She avoided sleep as long as she could; at nights in her silent bed fulminating nightmares had awakened her, blinding her heart again and again until she was blunted and numb.
She saw Peter in a black silk shirt on a street in Beirut. She called to him but he did not turn. She kept calling and calling with no response. He went around a corner, and when she caught up, the street disappeared into the blackness of her room.
Then she was with him, as she had been many times, in one of the mountain clefts above the town. The great trees called cedars of Hiram veiled the ground with shadows of interlocked tracery. Sitting under the trees she watched as Peter climbed the rocks, his brown back glistening, his arms and legs like ropes tied to the cliff. Her body tensed more and more, the hot white sunlight gradually turning to snow; and she grew stiff and cold, unable to cry out or even move as he fell without warning into a cavity in the mountain, splashing the rocks with blood.
Her only comfort was in the remembered echo of his mother’s voice, the teacher who had given her heart and language. Rafqa’s voice was a quiet ripple like a bird’s. On warm days they had left the classroom and by the cold stream near the school she had sat with Fatima and the other girls, singing songs in English and reciting the catechism. She remembered the way Rafqa talked to her boy. He was quiet and remote with most people, tense as if with rage, but became alert around his mother. They got caught up in each other’s voices speaking rapid English and Fatima was left far behind.
Rafqa, a large, dark-haired woman, had inherited her blue eyes from her English father. All Fatima knew of him was from her own parents—that Rafqa’s father had been a British army man who had never gone home after the world war, and that he was much older than Rafqa’s mother. From her Peter got his blue eyes and the library. Rafqa and Peter were surrounded by books, most of them very old—left to her, she said, by her father. In the study hall the smell of books reminded Fatima of Rafqa. Both Peter and his mother read for long hours, and Fatima had learned to read English from Rafqa’s books just as she learned to speak from the stories she told. For hours Fatima would sit alongside Peter as he devoured Churchill’s history of England or ancient volumes of the Britannica in musty leather.
The other schoolboys harassed Peter. If they read anything, it was texts on their phones—books didn’t exist for them. Peter had no father, he had no interest in football, only in reading and climbing, and his blue eyes meant that he did not belong. Lean and strong, he could have outrun them all and they knew it; so that was another reason to resent him. Once when the Syrians were being driven from Lebanon some of the Muslim boys threw rocks at Peter. His response was stark. One of the boys lost the use of his jaw and another couldn’t see from one eye for a long time.
Always she had the feeling that Peter was looking beyond the school, beyond her—even beyond his mother. There was something hard in him, something interfused with the granite cliffs he could not resist. Fatima remembered once during catechism when Peter walked past and whistled a hello to his mother. She caught Rafqa watching him with a peculiar look in her eyes. In later years Fatima came to recognize that look. It was fear.
When he had left for the seminary Fatima fought down tears. She struggled so hard at the going-away party that her throat hurt for days afterward. They had been inseparable children, but Peter had grown tall and withdrawn; by then she had no more claim on his friendship than anyone else did. She was surprised to get a letter from him a few weeks after he left—a long letter filled with precise observations about what he was experiencing in seminary. It was the first letter she had ever received in her life from anyone. Every month or so another one would come—never a text message or a phone call, always a meticulous handwritten letter.
Although the letters came less often over the years, the conversation continued. Peter’s letters were like long questions. She would write back as best she could, but she often felt that his letters were not addressed so much to her as to some imaginary correspondent from whom he hoped for more answers than she could give. The letters were sometimes incomprehensible to her. His teache
rs, he wrote, taught that Ishmael was the natural son of Abraham and thus represented carnal, fallen humanity, while Isaac was the miracle son who represented redeemed humanity. “But we are from Ishmael, you and I,” he wrote. “My mother is from Ishmael.”
She responded that it should make no difference. He wrote back: “It is St. Augustine who says so.” He had become fascinated with the concept of hatred, with Augustine’s account of the citizens of God’s kingdom as strangers among the hateful citizens of this world. It began with Cain and Abel and continued through Ishmael and Isaac and Esau and Jacob. The stone that Cain dropped was still falling on his brother, he wrote.
He went to the Maronite Seminary in Rome and from there he told her about the Cardinal, the great man who had taken him into his staff. His internship grew to a full assignment and the letters came less often over the years. Fatima went to a nursing school at Beirut and then returned to her village to care for her own parents as they wavered into old age and died. After a long time she realized that she was now alone. She would go to visit her old teacher, now Sister Rafqa, at the convent and to hear news of Peter, who was rising through ranks in the Church.
Then, a few years later, the letters began to change. They became regular once again, even frequent. And the day came when he knocked at her door in al-Besharri.
It all seemed like a gilded dream to her now. The days of pain in her throat—the same ache she had felt when he had gone away the first time so long before—had given way to an icy moisture all over her body. She shuddered with cold. The resonating cycle of her memories wouldn’t stop; she needed to put her mind to something else. Anything else.
Then, getting up from her bed to reach for her lesson book, she fell sick and dizzy to the floor.
NanoTechnology Center, Technion, Haifa, 1100h
Wrapped in a woolen shawl, Nathan Levinsky sat at a computer station and checked the weather forecast for the fifth time that morning. Hot and dry, it said. He kept the laboratory cold, and for good reason. The heat wave outside worried Levinsky more than he would admit, even to himself. He did not have full confidence in the stability of his invention and wished that the so called security people would do their jobs and find it soon. Police were the same everywhere: brutal and ignorant. It didn’t matter whose side they were on, the two stupid musclemen sitting outside his office unexcepted.
Levinsky had grown up despising the police. The dull Soviet bullies of his youth had taught him some of what it meant to be a Jew. Once a drunken pair of them had pushed his father against a streetlamp and beaten him because of his beard and forelocks. It had been at this time of year, during the high holy days. When people said “shanah tovah” to him, he remembered his father’s bowed head as he sat on the street trying to breathe between sobs after the men had punched him. This was what the new year had always meant to him. He hated those men in their official green, their thick faces and the filth from their mouths. They contradicted all order and decency—the very things they were supposed to uphold—it was intolerable.
He remembered also his father’s round, gentle face, his whiskers, and the bowl of a black kippah on his head. The Holocaust of the Jews had lapped close to Reb Levinsky’s home by 1942, and the family barely escaped death during the war and assimilation after it. His surviving friends yielded and lost their identity. But he filled his sons, both Emanuel and Nathan, with the Talmud. From childhood they could recite rabbinical opinions on every question of life although Nathan never agreed with Emanuel on which opinions were correct. The two boys were like black and white, fire and water. If Nathan said yes, Emanuel said no. Nathan was ruddy with hair and beard like wires. Emanuel was soft-eyed with hair like black silk. The Talmud was the battleground between their two natures. Where Nathan saw order and mechanism, Emanuel sensed a fluidity, an infinite set of possible interpretations. For Nathan, the rulings of Talmud fit together like beams in the giant structure of truth; for Emanuel, the books were like elusive poems with no set meaning—“Just when you think you can touch it, it dissolves,” he would say. They would fight while their father moaned delightedly in the background: “Learning is achieved only in company,” he reassured their mother. Talmud tied the boys together but also pulled them apart.
It was no surprise that Nathan went into nano-engineering and Emanuel into microbiology. Both were intrigued by the microscopic—one by the solid world, the other by the liquid. The solid world was perfectly predictable. Nathan was put off by the universe of mutations upon mutations that intrigued his brother and found himself captivated by mathematics. In numbers, he felt, God could be most truly discerned. During his schooldays he buried himself in his math studies and at nights he pored over books of Gematria, all the numbers of the Tanakh, even the Kabbala. His father warned him against this stuff, and of course he recognized that most of it was foolishness; but there were patterns in the prophets, patterns in time that eluded description but that he could sense as only a born mathematician can.
Because of his love of numbers his father drew him easily into the prophets. He became obsessed as Reb Levinsky analyzed alongside him the measurements of the grand temple to be built in the end times in Jerusalem. They carefully took the prophecies apart and examined the structure of each. When Nathan dreamed of the Prophet Yechezkah’s angel with his measuring rod he saw his own father, wool-bearded, resplendent in priestly white, calculating with square and plumb bob the proportions of the House of the Lord. And when at each Passover his father pleaded with God, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” Nathan envisioned entering at last into a vast sanctuary of cut diamond and emerald pulsing with light.
He only later realized that his father’s vision had also captured his brother. For Emanuel the Reb pictured rivers flowing from the Temple of Jerusalem to heal the desert, just as Yechezkah had prophesied. Emanuel came to see the temple as the nucleus of all things, the well of all holiness. He became strict about one thing: he wanted to pray in the direction of Jerusalem and asked Nathan to calculate the precise angle of approach. Nathan had been delighted to find that their little city in Ukraine, west of Donetsk, was on the same longitude as Jerusalem; so the brothers faced directly south when they prayed. His father talked endlessly of aliya—the return to Israel, the ineluctable pull of the Holy Land, and how they would all make the aliya someday, and then they would find peace.
At length a short thaw in the Cold War permitted the family to leave for Israel. When the Levinskys caught sight for the first time of the gold dome above the city of Jerusalem, they did as the Talmud commands and tore the coats they wore.
The most logical place for the brothers was the Technion Institute. Here their studies diverged and so did their relationship. After a decade of advanced work they could barely speak each other’s language. Nathan buried himself in microelectronics while Emanuel was often in Jerusalem working with the famous Leibowitz and other biochemists. Although they lived in adjoining neighborhoods they seldom saw each other and when they did so, they were unnaturally cordial about it. The hot lifelong arguments that had bound them so closely together seemed remote now. Both men married well. Avital, Nathan’s wife, belonged to a well-off Orthodox family, and her strict routines suited him. Emanuel’s wife was an ideal match, quiet, thoughtful, but unfortunately burdened with one serious miscarriage after another. She hemorrhaged repeatedly, heavily, and finally weakened and died.
After that Emanuel changed. He even changed his name—to Shor, the “ox.” Emanuel wanted to “simplify,” he said; he wanted nothing more than to stand and drink at the holy well like a humble ox. He continued to do genetic research—breakthroughs came easily—but he became more and more devout, turning most of his own projects over to others while joining the Cohanim project eagerly.
By contrast Nathan’s religion had over the years turned into automatic observances. He went as programmed to synagogue, but more and more his mind stayed in the lab. Now, after many years, Emanuel began to come a
gain to the house to talk. The subject was God. His brother’s hair had turned a soft gray, but his eyes had the same youthful depth of pleading. At first Nathan gave the routine responses to Emanuel’s questions: Would there be a Messiah? What would be the sign of his coming? How would we know him? Would the world be renewed? Would the temple be restored? From the deepfreeze of his Talmudic memory Nathan dredged up what he could, but he understood that his brother knew these things as well as he—that Emanuel was not interested so much in answering the questions as in talking about them. And one question in particular disturbed Nathan.
“We say we have made the aliya—the return. But have we?”
Nathan would lie awake over this question. When Catriel was born, he would walk the floor with her at night and ponder it. Was the aliya only the return to eretz Israel? Would their father, may he rest in peace, be satisfied with this semi-return, with this reflexive religion that could be practiced anywhere? Had the return been somehow aborted?
When the Intifada broke out Emanuel gave up his house and most of his belongings to join the Zaka—the gold-jacketed troop of Orthodox Jews who collected body parts from bomb sites. Palestinian youths decorated with cylinders of TATP—the explosive called “the mother of Satan”—were blowing themselves up in the streets of Jerusalem, taking dozens of innocents with them. He became a legendary member of the Zaka and was called into bombing sites up and down Israel and even into south Lebanon, where he spent a whole summer cataloging remains.
Emanuel’s swift accuracy seemed inspired; but in truth it was his microbiological training that suited him for the work of the Zaka. He recognized body parts and could make connections that lay members could not. He used a microscope to connect a hand to a foot quickly. Often, though, there was no need for the microscope: once, while inspecting the undercarriage of a blasted-out bus he found the bomber’s head cleanly shaven off at the neck. It was the head of a beautiful Arab boy who seemed only to be sleeping. As he later told Nathan, he could not imagine how such beauty and such evil could combine in one person.
The Day of Atonement Page 27