Bloodline (15 page)

S
TANDING BY
an empty hospital bed, Mahmud had watched the imam from a distance for some time, but although their eyes never met, he knew that the imam had seen him too. Dark Semitic features were common to Arabs and Jews, but the imam would recognize Mahmud for what he was.

Mahmud had been watching as the imam entered Bilal's room. He'd waited patiently for the imam to leave. Now Mahmud stood outside the front doors of the hospital. The sunlight on his face felt good after hours drenched in the cold fluorescent light of the hospital. Before too long the brown robes of the imam emerged from the automatic sliding doors of the hospital and Mahmud saw him blink in the sun.

“
As-salamu alaykum,
” said Mahmud, and he took three paces toward the man. The imam seemed startled by the Arabic words and blinked again as he tried to focus on Mahmud while his eyes adjusted to the glare.

“
Wa alaykum as-salamu wa rahmatu Allah wa barakatuh,”
came the holy man's reply.

“What brings you to the hospital today?”

“I go where I am needed,” the imam replied bluntly as he looked Mahmud up and down. “You are a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you from?”

“Beit Safafa,” replied Mahmud.

“Ahh . . .” said the imam, as if the name of the town where Mahmud grew up said it all.

Beit Safafa was an Arab neighborhood in southern Jerusalem. For decades it had been split down the middle, an invisible division of hatred and suspicion separating the Israeli side from the Jordanian side. But after the Six-Day War, when the Israeli army drove back the Jordanians, the township became a symbol of cooperation where both Jews and Arabs lived side by side peacefully. But in truth it wasn't where Mahmud had been born. Desperate for his son to grow up away from the tension and violence of the West Bank, which had characterized Mahmud's father's upbringing, the family had moved to Beit Safafa. Arriving poor and illiterate, they lived four people to a single room while his father drove a taxi eighteen hours a day to send Mahmud to school—an education that had been a gateway to a life his father never knew but had had vision enough to dream of for his son.

While the town of his childhood was a source of pride to Mahmud, the tone of the imam's response was very different.

“You grew up among the Jews, then. And now you work among them too.”

“Do you know that boy? Bilal?” Mahmud asked, ice in his voice.

“He is a child of Allah. As are we all.”

“And did Allah wish for him to carry a bomb?”

The question was so blunt it surprised the imam, but he didn't flinch, instead replying, “Did Allah wish for his people to be brutalized into poverty?”

Mahmud said nothing. The imam continued. “You are a doctor?”

Mahmud nodded.

“You are a good Muslim?”

“My father taught me to be so,” replied Mahmud.

“I see . . . Then why are you here? Why don't you use your doctor skills to help your own people instead of helping these Jews?”

“Jews and Muslims and Christians come to this hospital. We treat the sick. We don't ask what they believe. Anyway, what kind of help are you offering to Bilal?”

The imam's eyes narrowed and his lips tightened. “I am guiding him to Allah. Who is guiding you?”

“When does it end?” asked Mahmud. His voice had lost its edge. It was barely more than a whisper. He turned away from the imam and walked back into the hospital.

T
HE OUTWARD CHANGE
in Eliahu Spitzer's appearance was minimal but momentous. It was glacially slow but, now that he came to look back on events, inexorable. Perhaps, in all his secular life, in his work protecting the State of Israel from Palestinian terrorists and other madmen, he'd hungered for a higher calling, for a spiritual side to his innate practicality, but there were times when Eliahu's change surprised even him. Yet, when he had a moment of doubt, he remembered back to the events two years ago that had triggered his transformation, and it all somehow came together.

Before his daughter's murder, before his massive heart attack six months later, he had been—like so much of Israeli society—secular. His father, a Polish immigrant, had been ultra-religious, a former Yeshiva student who would have been a rabbi had not the war intervened. But Eliahu rejected religion and in his social life and education embraced the secular Israeli lifestyle.

For him and later his family, the synagogue was a three-times-a-year obligation at the insistence of his wife. He'd met with rabbis many times for his work and been to the ultra-religious corners of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but religion had never been anything other than what he'd done for personal cultural reasons. Yet, like a stone on which water drips and drips, after his daughter's murder and his brush with death, Eliahu's secularism
eroded and he made room for a deity in his life. He'd actually seen God and it had changed his life forever.

He had two great regrets: the first was his rejection of his father's faith and that his awakening to the Almighty through the sect of the Neturei Karta had taken him over fifty years to realize; and the second was that, because of his position as a senior security officer for the government, the leaders of the sect had begged him to hide his affiliation to the Neturei Karta and to continue working within Shin Bet as usual and further the sect's cause.

He'd been hiding his faith for three years and in that time he'd worked to change the sect's methods of making the Messiah come early. They believed in prayer; so did he, but assisted prayer. He had laid out an ambitious plan for the leaders of Neturei Karta, and they'd eventually given their approval. In the three years since covertly joining Neturei Karta, he'd paved the way for the coming of the Messiah by honing and refining plans to bring about chaos, the destruction of the government, and its replacement by fervently religious Jews. And then all Jewish voices would be lifted to heaven so that the Messiah heard and would come.

Some members of Neturei Karta refused to go along with what Eliahu suggested to their leadership, believing that the restoration of the nation of Israel should be brought about by the will of the Messiah and not at a time dictated by the sect; and when they heard that people might be killed in the process, they were horrified. But their leader, Reb Shmuel Telushkin, reassured them that fighting governments of foreign lands was unacceptable but fighting Zionists who were traitors against the laws of the Bible was necessary.

Eliahu's identity was kept a strict secret from most of the membership while Reb Telushkin prepared him to be a member of the sect in every respect other than wearing the sect's uniform of the black fur hat and the long black silken frock coat and growing his sideburns.

His transformation from secular to Neturei Karta was carefully handled and subtle. After the shattering events he and his family suffered, he changed his appearance only slightly. Now he wore a small blue and white skullcap, the symbol to Jews that he was a religious man. He wore his Neturei Karta uniform of eighteenth-century garb only when he was in their synagogue, carefully screened from impure eyes; not even his wife knew.

The instrument of his change had begun with the murder of his daughter on a school excursion to the Dead Sea. For days he hovered over her bedside, looking at her torn body swathed in bandages, praying to a remote and invisible God for her recovery, one he'd not spoken with since he was a boy with his father in synagogue, knowing that her life was ebbing away as her vital signs continued to weaken.

Others might have sworn off the deity, becoming confirmed atheists because God hadn't answered their prayers; but as the doctors switched off the machinery that was keeping his daughter's shattered body on the threshold of life, Eliahu prayed fervently for God to look after her in heaven, now that he could no longer protect her on earth.

The month of ritual mourning had done little to mollify his hatred of the Palestinians, and he'd smoked and drunk more than usual before and after the crowds had come to his home to comfort the mourners and say evening prayers. Two of the visitors to his home had been Neturei Karta rabbis. His wife was surprised, as was he. But he welcomed any visitor who could lift the burden of grief he felt, even for a moment. At first he thought that they were just ordinary black-hatted rabbis. They kept their identity disguised until the third visit to his house of mourning, when the older man said that they were guardians of the city. In ancient Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, that meant they were Neturei Karta. His wife, knowing they were anti-Zionist, wanted them gone, but he accepted comfort from anywhere and took them into his study, where he asked about
their beliefs in God and the afterlife. They spoke soft and conciliatory words into his ears, and for the first time such words from the lips of Hasidic rabbis began to mean something to him. He knew consciously that he was clutching at straws, but he was a drowning man.

Eliahu's wife continued to view the rabbis with derision bordering on hatred, but the Shin Bet leader still listened to their words carefully as they enticed him out of the protective shell of his previously secular life. His wife railed against them and their desire to destroy the State of Israel. Soon they became the focus of her grief, expressed as anger and hatred against those who wanted to demolish her homeland and replace it with a Messianic theocracy.

The rabbis of the sect told Eliahu that the only way for him to meet again with his daughter was with the establishment of the Holy Nation of Israel, not the secular state that had been founded by Zionists and the irreligious. They said that this was holy land and that the Lord God was ready to send his Messiah to ease all the pain and suffering of His people, provided certain conditions were met. The rabbis begged Eliahu to come and see their mentor and spiritual leader of the Neturei Karta, Reb Shmuel Telushkin, who would explain more, much more, to him.

But when the thirty-day period of mourning was over, Eliahu stopped thinking of his conversation with the Hasidic rabbis. He returned to work after the religious
s'loshim
ended, and threw himself into his job with renewed energy. He wasn't ready to go back onto the streets, and so they created a research position for him. And he ate hamburgers and french fries and drank liters of Coke and Pepsi at his newly created desk in his new office, rarely moved from his chair, took a taxi home, and sat in front of the television watching American cop dramas. The words of the Neturei Karta faded.

That is, until the morning he'd just finished a meeting and
was crushed by a pain in his chest. His heart failed just as it had been broken when his daughter died. In the hospital he was immediately injected with thrombolytics to dissolve the clot and was wheeled up to an operating theater to be given a quintuple bypass, a wonder of modern surgery. And it was in the hospital that he saw the light . . .

Literally!

While he was waiting for the operation to begin, he was given oxygen and injected with drugs to keep him alive before the surgeons could open his chest, and while he was lying in the pre-op ward, he slipped into a coma. The trauma nurses hit the alarm buttons and doctors rushed in. He was given electric shocks and wheeled immediately into the theater. But what the medical staff didn't know was that while he had his eyes closed he could sense that massive things were being done to his body. His eyes were tightly shut but he could actually see a brilliance above his head. The noises of the theater, the urgent instructions of the surgeon and nurses—even the smell of the disinfectants and the anesthetic—all faded, replaced by a warm and gentle atmosphere of peace, serenity, and calm, and the smell of jasmine. Jasmine, Shoshanna's favorite perfume.

He opened his eyes and near the ceiling, floating above him, he saw his beautiful daughter Shoshanna, dressed in the white of purity, smiling at him, waving to him, encouraging him to leave his pain and grief behind and follow her into the whiteness. Behind her, he saw an even more brilliant light, which he could hardly look into, but it shrouded his daughter in a sort of halo. He clearly heard her saying, “
Abba
, come, follow . . .”

And he did. He rose from the bed and could see the faces of the nurses and surgeons desperately trying to keep him alive. He saw his chest open, his heart beating, surgeons quickly trying to hook him up to machines to keep the blood flowing. He looked around the room and could clearly see the surgical table on which he was lying, the doctors and nurses, the instruments, the bottles
and syringes and medicines and tubes. As he floated, trying desperately to reach his daughter's outstretched hand, calling out her name, he heard a voice in his ear. He recognized it immediately. It was the rabbi who had visited him months earlier when he was in mourning for Shoshanna, the rabbi who was a Hasid and who told him that the answer to his nightmare was the Neturei Karta. The rabbi's voice whispered, “Reb Shmuel.”

Fifteen hours later, he woke in intensive care, but all he could remember was the brilliant white light, his beautiful daughter, and the urgent need to see Reb Shmuel Telushkin so that he could understand why the vision had come to him.

He'd discussed it with his cardiac surgeon, who had told him blithely that it was an unusual but perfectly understandable function of oxygen deprivation and the bright lights of the operating theater, and that he was to put it out of his mind. Which he assured the doctor he would do.

But the image stayed with him, haunted him, and even when he was exercising and trying to get his mind and body back to the way they once were, all he could think about was the way his beautiful daughter had looked, so grown-up and peaceful and serene. When he left the hospital two weeks later to go home, the voice and images remained as strong as ever in his mind. After two months of boredom, walking, watching television, and going to the hospital for checkups, and out of curiosity, he went to see Reb Telushkin in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim district.