by Alan Gold
The Duke of Champagne screamed at the pain of his nearly severed arm, his lifeless hand dropping the broadsword.
Nimrod saw all this from behind the Arab warrior, saw the dark-skinned man’s back arch in victory as he raised his sword once more for a final blow on the duke, now with no weapon or limb to parry.
Nimrod saw all this and ran. Not into the darkness or away in fright, but straight at the warrior in front of him. He ran with all his might and all his speed and sent his body forcibly colliding into the torso of the Mohammedan warrior before the final blow could fall on his master’s head.
The two figures tumbled into the dirt, arms and legs and feet in a melee of confusion and fury. The momentum pushed the Arab face down onto the ground but also carried Nimrod over the man’s body, knocking the breath from his chest.
As Nimrod struggled to draw in air and find his way to his feet, his hands grabbed at his side and grew wet with blood. The Arab blade had somehow pierced him during the tackle. But there was no time to contemplate the wound as the Mohammedan was already standing and drew a curved dagger from a sash at his waist. The man leapt towards Nimrod, who screamed and tried to roll away, but the Mohammedan was too quick and suddenly his knees pinioned Nimrod’s arms to the ground. Nimrod saw the dagger draw back, ready to be swept across his throat, and tried to remember the Jewish prayer for those in mortal danger, but it had left his mind.
He closed his eyes and waited for the death blow. But it never came.
Instead there was a sickening wet thud and Nimrod’s eyes blinked open to see the Arab man’s body on the ground beside him, his face a mess of blood and fragments of broken skull. The body of the warrior shuddered and twitched beside the prostrate Nimrod.
It was only then that Nimrod saw the face of his saviour who wielded the stone that had killed the Arab. Over him, the light of the moon and stars gave just enough illumination to show the face of Simeon looking down at him.
‘You should be glad I never obey doctors’ orders.’
But Nimrod’s mind raced to the fate of the duke and he scrambled over to the body of his master lying flat on the ground, his nearly severed limb still pumping blood.
The duke’s eyes focused on the faces of Nimrod and Simeon as they knelt over him. Blood poured from the open slice where his arm lay at an obscene angle. As a doctor, Nimrod knew that the end would come as soon as the duke’s life force drained away into the earth of Jerusalem. There was nothing he could do as a physician. The wound was of an enormity that defied any medicine or surgery.
Neither Simeon nor Nimrod knew what to say. The duke gazed at them both for what seemed like a long stretch of silence, then slowly his eyes focused not on their faces but something behind them. The two Jews turned to see what it was that their lord was staring at.
They saw nothing at first, but soon saw what the duke was focusing on. High on the hill, the city of Jerusalem was beginning to glow golden as the very first rays of dawn lit the minarets and crucifixes and the tops of the white walls.
‘I see the bones . . .’
The words of the duke, whispered as his last before too much of his blood had coursed from his body, made Simeon and Nimrod turn away from the splendour of the city.
‘I see the bones. All of them. All around me . . .’
Nimrod placed a hand on the duke’s chest but could find no words.
‘I see the bones of all who have died. All who have fought and died.’
The duke’s eyes found Nimrod clearly for the last time and held him fast.
‘I’m sorry . . . Tell the bones I’m sorry . . .’
And the duke died, in the shadow of the walls of the city he’d come to relieve.
Nimrod felt a great desire to stay, to sit with the lord he’d known so well and for so long. To simply sit and wait for the sun to warm the dead man’s face, so that his journey into eternity was lit. But a voice calling out dragged the two men from the moment.
The voice was that of Michel Roux, unmistakable and distinct. Simeon grabbed at Nimrod’s clothes and hauled him to his feet.
‘Come on, we have to go,’ Simeon said in a harsh whisper.
But Nimrod resisted. ‘Where? Where shall we go? We have nowhere to go and no one to trust!’
In that moment Simeon found a sense of faith that had long been absent in him.
‘I’d rather die inside the walls of the holy city with my people than out here with these dogs of Crusaders. For surely we will both be dead by morning, either at the hands of Roux, or by a sword from those within the walls. Come with me, doctor,’ said Simeon, pulling Nimrod up, and then forcing him to follow. ‘We have to get to the tunnel!’
They scurried towards the walls, Nimrod wondering what tunnel the man was talking about. They ran into the early morning gloom, with the voice of Michel Roux behind them, baying for their blood.
Nimrod followed, too exhausted to ask Simeon to explain, the wound delivered by the Saracen beginning to hurt viciously. He pressed his hand to his side, holding in the blood that was leaking from the wound, but he could feel his head growing light. He leant on Simeon’s arm as they scrambled around the edge of the white stone walls and through the low tangled bushes and stunted trees that grew in the shadow of the city.
Was Simeon seeking something from memory or instinct? Nimrod could not tell. But the wiry man moved with purpose and focus, eyes darting back and forth, searching for signs that Nimrod could not see. Finally Simeon stopped when they were well clear of the evil Roux. ‘There has long been rumour in my family of a tunnel into the city, an ancient watercourse,’ he said breathlessly. ‘This ancient tunnel was supposed to be used by the inhabitants. Some say my family had a hand in it, but who knows? Yet our connection has come down through generations of my family. They spoke of a watercourse built long ago. In the time of King Solomon. Few know of it, other than us Jews, and perhaps the Muslims.’
Nimrod’s hand immediately reached into his tunic to touch the medallion around his neck. Simeon saw the hesitation and then his gaze moved down to Nimrod’s other hand grasping at his side, saw the blood seeping between his fingers. He wanted to say that such a story had also been told from father to son in his own family, for generation upon generation, but he was weak from the wound and found talking difficult.
Simeon continued. ‘They say of this tunnel that it runs beneath the walls of the city, carrying water to the pools below. If we climb upwards from the pools of Siloam, pray God Almighty that what is told in my family is correct, we will come into the heart of the city.’
Was Simeon saying this to keep up his spirits as he died? Or did the wiry merchant truly know how to find the ancient tunnel? As Nimrod held the metal seal at his neck, he remembered the words written in ancient Hebrew. He knew by heart the name Matanyahu and the story handed down in his family of a builder who worked in the time of King Solomon. And Nimrod remembered the words inscribed on the seal.
‘I, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, have built this tunnel for the glory of my King, Solomon the Wise, in the Twenty Second year of his reign.’
When the siege engines made by the Genoese sailors in Joppa arrived and began assaulting the walls, new life was breathed into the Crusader campaign. The cheers of the soldiers could be heard throughout the valleys and over the hills as the siege weapons hurled massive rocks over the towers as well as the bodies of the recently killed Saracens back into the city, causing hysteria and mayhem among the residents. Not only did these dead bodies flying over the ramparts cause horror and panic, but they were a marvellous weapon for spreading disease and destroying morale.
But the noise of the melee above was lost on Nimrod and Simeon as they made their way, slowly and painfully, up the ancient tunnel. They had found the entrance to the watercourse covered by a thousand years of rock slides, dirt, fallen debris and dead vegetation, but Simeon had been right. From the pools of Siloam the watercourse became clear when they pulled away the vegetation from where the ground w
as wet. They slowly, painfully, climbed the black and slippery tunnel upwards towards the centre of the city.
Like Nimrod’s ancestor Abram a thousand years before, a youth completely unknown to him, he and Simeon were repeating precisely what the young Israelite had done in the time of the Romans when he returned the seal made by Matanyahu, along with the woman who would become his wife, Ruth, daughter of Eli and Naomi of the Tribe of Judah.
With a millennium separating their ascent into the tunnel, the ancestor and the descendant slipped on the same ground covered in black moss and squeezed through gaps in the rock that were little wider than their bodies.
As they eventually ascended to a larger and more open space, they felt like they’d climbed from the bottom to the top of a mountain, but in reality they had no idea how far up the city of Jerusalem they had ascended. Nimrod was growing weaker by the hour, and the blood loss, though largely staunched, had caused him to feel faint almost every step of the way.
Though a millennium separated them, Nimrod and Simeon, like Abram and Ruth, eventually rounded what appeared to be a bend in the tunnel and, out of the deadened silence, punctuated only by their footfalls and their breathing, they heard a noise.
But unlike the noise of the pagan conquerors walking the streets of Aelia Capitolina when Rome commanded the city, the noise that Nimrod and Simeon heard was the wailing of Jews, Christians and Mohammedans. With the arrival of the siege engines, the inhabitants of Jerusalem understood that these were their last days, and were praying together, in concert, to their one God. Even the Christians believed, despite the flags with the Cross of Jesus clearly displayed, that these were the end times, and chanted a prayer to save them from the onslaught.
It was only when Nimrod and Simeon, dirty, wet, cold and aching from the climb came to the underside of the pavement on which thousands of feet scurried above that they realised their way was barred.
The ancient water causeway had been blocked four hundred years earlier by the Caliph Abd al-Malik when he’d ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock Mosque. He’d made access to the water into a well, and the sides were so narrow, steep and slippery that they were impossible for Nimrod and Simeon to climb.
And so, as the tens of thousands of citizens of Jerusalem were wailing in fear of the assault and the destruction of their city, just the thickness of a pavement and a depth of rock in which the well had been built separated the two men from their besieged brethren. Nimrod and Simeon sat in the dark.
‘We should return to the valley floor,’ said Simeon, already turning his body to negotiate the way down. But Nimrod’s strength had left him. His hand was still pressed to his side but the blood, once crimson between his fingers, was now black and dry and spent. His limbs were numb and thoughts drifted towards sleep. He could go no further.
‘No,’ he said in little more than a whisper.
‘You can. We can make it back. Once the Crusaders have taken the city we will be outside the walls and can make our escape. They won’t notice us when they’re slaughtering the inhabitants.’
But Simeon’s words were futile.
Nimrod shook his head. ‘I die here, my friend.’
The siege assault took five days to drain the city of its strength. Flaming arrows set fire to rooftops and stables, dead bodies hurled through the air crashed through ceilings. Rocks exploded with the pounding of battering rams. Women and children sheltered from the nightmare as men died in the midst of it. Then, with a final breach of the outer wall, the Crusaders streamed into the city.
The Crusaders screamed ‘Hep, hep, hep hoorah’ as they cleaved every limb from every body that happened in their path. The words meant Hierisolyma est perdita, ‘Jerusalem is lost’, an insult to all the inhabitants. The Christian men of God had ordered the Crusaders to shout it out as they entered the city. And the charge and chant was led by Michel Roux, a man never driven by faith but by power and an unquenchable desire for riches. Roux led the charge with a fervour to rival any cleric, and his bloodlust fell like rain on his victims.
Tens of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered in a single day, an orgy of killing, rape and theft. Nobody was spared the most hideous of deaths; nor was anybody saved to become a slave. Even many Christians of Jerusalem, fighting alongside their Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters to defend the city, were hacked to pieces.
The destruction was total and the impact of the pain on the city would course through its veins for centuries to come.
But by the time the end had come for Jerusalem, Simeon was well away from the city and leaving the Crusaders’ madness far behind him. He had sat with his friend Nimrod until the end. The man who had spared his life died in his arms.
Yet before his final breath slipped away, the doctor had taken a small metal seal from around his neck and pressed it into the palm of the merchant.
‘Take this. It was born in this tunnel. But don’t let it die in this tunnel. Take it with you.’
And with that Simeon had left the secret tunnel beneath the walls of the ancient holy city, climbing back down the steep, slippery path to emerge into the sunlight.
North Jerusalem
Shabbat morning, 15 May 1948
Immanuel Berin looked up from the table, and tried to take in the scene so that he could tell his grandchildren in years to come where he had been when the United Nations decided on the fate of Israel and its Jews. That is, if he married again when this madness was over, and if his wife was young enough to bear him a second family.
But no matter who was gathered in the room around the radio set listening to Kol Yisrael re-broadcast the vote being taken at that moment two thousand miles north in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris by the General Assembly, two faces were missing, faces that he’d never see again.
He was older than all of the others who gathered around the radio to listen. He’d been through vastly more in his life than almost all of them, and took its vicissitudes in his stride. In his life, he’d been to the heights and sunk to the depths. If Israel was granted nation status by the two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, all well and good; if not, then he would wait another year, and one year after that if necessary. But for these kids, it was life and death.
He looked for the face of his brilliant young protégée, Judit Etzion, but she wasn’t there. He felt disgust when his mind tried to remember her face. He didn’t know where she was, nor where his men had dumped her body, never to be found, nor given a burial, nor marked with a gravestone. He’d specifically told them not to tell him so that in years to come, he wouldn’t inadvertently travel there, and suddenly remember her. He wanted to expunge her from his mind for all time. The others in the MGB death squads . . . well, they were just irrelevant, pawns in a geopolitical game. But Judit had a presence in his mind, in his actions, and even in the room where he was, and he had to expunge her for all time. She had reminded him so much of his wife, victim of the Nazis.
And as Israel’s history was written, Judit would become one of Israel’s fallen heroines, remembered for the good deeds she’d done to secure the nation. Known only to a small number of Israelis for the hateful, traitorous, murderous things she’d committed as an agent of the Kremlin.
He looked around and continued to be distressed by the absence of the young and beautiful face of Ashira, so full of zeal and intelligence and potential to be a great Israeli in a new nation, murdered by Judit and her insane cabal for reasons he hadn’t been told, and upon which he could only speculate.
But all the others were there, except for those who’d died in the course of the past year’s Arab uprising, or had been arrested by the British and incarcerated. Proud that he’d been able to bring so many through to see this day, Immanuel listened to the voice of the reporter, detailing how the UN was voting in Paris.
While the meeting was called to order by the session’s Chair at the UN, at another radio in a corner of the room, one of the young men listening suddenly shouted out with glee.
‘Hey, the USA has just recognised Israel. The White House put out a statement by President Truman that says that the Yanks have been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognises the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel . . . you hear that? . . . the State of Israel.’
All the room erupted into cheers. Only Immanuel Berin knew what was behind Truman’s move, and the President’s friendship with Eddie Jacobson, a former partner of Truman’s in a clothing store, who was still a close friend. The US Department of State was against granting nationhood to Israel for fear of the war that would follow, as well as Russian intervention, but a phone call and meeting with Jacobson, who introduced him to Chaim Weizmann, changed the President’s mind. Immanuel smiled and wondered whether other nations had been created by friendships, happenstance and sheer mazel.
While waiting for the Chairman of the General Assembly to begin the voting process, Immanuel spoke to the young men and women around him. ‘Last night, the British army lowered its last flag to end its mandate over Palestine. The last British troops are leaving today. Six months ago, the United Nations voted for the partition of this land into the State of Israel and an independent, secure nation for the Arabs of Palestine. We Jews received far less land, fewer natural resources and a more fractured nation than we’d prayed for in all the years of our exile. Our birthright has been stripped from us. Yet we accepted the decision of the UN. The Arabs, given preferential treatment by the UN, have rejected out of hand what they were offered. For six months, they’ve been waging a civil war against us. But all that has been little more than a guerrilla conflict compared with what’s over the hill.