Hadassah Covenant, The (52 page)

Closest of all stood a nurse, fiddling with an IV-stand less than two feet from his sore shoulder. Exploiting his first sign of wakefulness, she pulled out an electronic thermometer, switched it on, and thrust it into his left ear.

“I was starting to doubt that I would ever see this city,” he groaned softly in Ari’s general direction after the instrument was withdrawn.

With a startled glance, they stepped to his bedside. Two pairs of hands reached out to soothe the old man as the fog continued to recede from his brain. Adrenaline kicked in to help lead him out of grogginess—he realized where he was.

A smile fought its way across the wrinkles of his face.

“Jerusalem,” he said in a raspy whisper. “At last.” Then a perplexed look crossed his face. “But what am I doing here? Who took me here?”

The last wakeful moment he could remember had elapsed in an underground control room in London, the city he had inhabited for half a century. Now . . .
Jerusalem
. A hospital room. And this incredible pain throbbing from a line down his chest . . .

“I know, Father,” Ari replied. “But you made it. We succeeded.”

“We did?
You
did?” His tone rose in plaintive hope.

“Yes, Father. It is all accomplished.”

He gave a sigh so deep and prolonged that it seemed as though he had spent a decade storing it up inside him. “I am so, so very grateful,” he said after it was over. “Did you finish the final tasks?”

In response, Ari pivoted cleanly on his heels with a smile of
anticipation playing on his face. His father frowned with curiosity, tried to rise up on his bed, and Hadassah reached over to help. From his position leaning against the pillow, he peered under lowered brows at a group in the corner of the room.

Someone stepped aside and a woman was revealed, standing there. She was an old woman, and she wore an oddly stricken expression. She took one doubtful step forward, then a second, more confident. Anek cocked his head with a questioning look. The woman grew closer and extended her arms, her lower lip quivering violently. She reached out with a tender motion, caressed his arm, and seemed to nearly swoon at the touch of his skin.

“Hana?” he asked, peering at her.

She nodded, her lip clenched between remnants of her front teeth, clearly incapable of responding in words.

Decades of deprivation had taken a toll on her, rendering her almost unrecognizable—almost, but not quite. It was she, his sister Hana. Those compelling green eyes gave her away.

He slowly reached out and uttered a pathetic groan that seemed to contain a dozen emotions at once:
surprise, love, relief, regret, grief . . .

The newcomer let out a faint sob, leaned forward, and took her brother’s trembling form into her arms. A long moment passed while the two swayed slightly, their knuckles whitening as they grasped each other’s shoulders. Over six decades had passed since they had seen each other, barely out of childhood.

There seemed no reason for their embrace to end. The others merely watched, wearing looks of faint embarrassment at the tears freely crisscrossing their own faces.

At last Hana pulled back, smiled, and touched a drop about to fall from his jaw.

“Papa always said you would find us someday. He’d say, ‘Anek made it, I know it. He got through. He’ll come for us someday.’”

“I am so sorry it took me such a long time . . .”

“Oh, Ani,” she said, her face softening at the sound of the long-lost term of endearment, “I too was sure you had made it, but then the years went on. And then when things got so bad, Father made the decision to go into hiding. He wept for a week. He tried to hide it, but we all saw it in his face. It was a disgrace for him, the failure
of every promise he had ever made about your return. We all knew it meant giving up on you—especially Momma. She never accepted it. And their relationship was never the same from that day forward.”

“Where did you go?”

“We went to Karkuk, and back into the textiles, only on a modest level. I ran a stall in the bazaar. Gabriel sold wholesale around town.”

“Father? Mother?”

“He went in 1954 with the influenza. She died in 1961. In her sleep.”

Anek nodded slowly, absorbing the knowledge. He had known that his parents would have passed, for he was a very old man himself—yet hearing the actual facts struck him harder than he had ever imagined it would. Finally, he took a deep breath and looked up to face her again.

“And Gabriel? Sabina?”

“Your brother Gabe was the man of the house for thirty years. But he was picked up by Saddam’s men early in the Iran war and accused of espionage. We . . . never saw him again.”

“Sabina?”

“Sabina married a butcher, a Muslim, against our wishes. He joined the Baath Party three years later, and within six months he had learned the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That she was Jewish, of course. We were in disguise. Our names were all changed.”

“What did he do to her?”

Her face fell and everyone in the room saw plainly that the answer was still too raw and unhealed for Hana to put into words.

A hoarse panting noise started up, and the faces all turned to Anek. The nurse rushed over, looked into his face, and grasped his wrist.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to postpone any further reunion for a few hours,” the nurse said in a loud, official voice. “Mr. al-Khalid is still very much recovering and needs his rest.”

Ari and the others turned to leave, but Anek reached out toward his son.

“No. I cannot bear not knowing. Did you follow my instructions?”

Ari smiled. “All your wishes are now met. It is the right thing, your being here in Jerusalem.”

“Tell me.”

“It is done, Father. We have proven the bloodline. The Exilarchy is reborn.”

“You found our proof?”

“We had to make the shortest invasion in the history of the American military. Or Israeli intelligence, for that matter. Iran.” “You mean their tombs . . . ?”

“Exactly. Although we found it necessary to disturb the dignity of the dead, it was worth it. Miraculously, Esther’s tomb in Hamadan still contained Mordecai and Esther’s intact remains. It seems an almost constant guardianship by the local authorities spared them the plague of tomb raiders. And in Mordecai’s sarcophagus, we found a letter. One obviously written after his death, yet buried with him. Father, you and I feared he had never married, yet this was a letter clearly written by a wife he had wed in his old age. The letter’s contents confirmed it all. Mordecai
did
marry Leah, the recipient of the Hadassah scrolls and great-great-granddaughter of King Jeconiah, the last king of Judah before the Captivity. The legends are true. Mordecai did marry into the lineage of David!”

Anek sighed loudly and reached out to shakily grasp his son’s hand.

“It gets even better, Father. Leah had addressed this letter to a child she bore shortly after Mordecai’s death, a son, Bejamin bar Mordecai, who would have been Jeconiah’s grandson three times removed.”

Anek’s mouth fell open, whether in awe or some internal spasm, it was difficult to tell. Ari leaned in to finish his report.

“The tomb’s document’s last pages told us the final chapter. When the tide of political favor went against the Jews once again—the same tide that brought about Leah’s death—Jesse and Esther were both exiled to the edges of the empire. There they lived at the fringes of Persian society, out of sight but never completely out of mind from the Jewish exile community and seemingly never far from the halls of power. And while Jesse’s youthful castration meant that they never were able to live together as husband and wife, they lived together as a loving father and mother to baby Benjamin, just as Mordecai had once taken in Esther as a child.

“Years later, when Emperor Darius the Second realized that the Jews were best managed by one of their own, he recalled the now
quite aged Esther to a place of prominence and favor. Jesse and Esther both died shortly after her restoration, but by this time Benjamin was a young man, and the favor on his adoptive mother’s life was transferred onto him. He was named Exilarch by acclamation, and led his people to the praise of both Persians and Jews alike. He was indeed father of the great Exilarch bloodline.”

The old man closed his thick eyelids slowly. He seemed relieved as much by the end of the long report as by the triumphant outcome of his life’s work. “Praise be to YHWH,” he whispered to himself. “After all these years. All this time.”

Hana spoke after the word had finally faded from the room. “How did you find us? With every passing year I lost a little more hope of ever seeing you again.”

“Your father didn’t tell you,” Ari interjected, “but it seems he left behind a record of your hiding place.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not considering who he left it with. The Rabbi of Baghdad. He probably meant it as a last-ditch lifeline, a dormant link. It was kept secret in a hiding place below the Battaween Synagogue. Unfortunately, the synagogue was broken into and the record was stolen, along with that of every hidden Jewish family in Iraq.”

“So you see, Hana,” said Anek, “I didn’t succeed at anything. I did nothing. It was my son who is the hero.”

“Thank you, Father, but we all know that is not true. You have been working toward this moment for a lifetime.”

Anek smiled broadly and closed his eyes, as though he was savoring a sweet scent. “Yes. I have.” His voice seemed to weaken audibly with every word he spoke.

Hadassah stepped forward and took his hand. “On behalf of my entire family, I want you to know that I am so sorry for all that took place between us. I ask your forgiveness.”

“You are forgiven, although I am not sure you need to be, my dear,” Anek said. “The events I spoke of happened many, many years ago.”

“Yes, that is true,” she answered. “But I am the only one left who can atone for them. I truly regret what my family put you through. I loved my father very much, and I miss him terribly. But he was just a man, capable of making mistakes. I would ask him why he treated
you the way he did, if only I could. But he died saving my life. I am proud of being his daughter, although I apologize for his mistakes. And still, I am also proud to name you as my uncle.”

Anek said nothing but reached a finely trembling hand up to hers. She took his and held it there, tightly, for a long moment. When she lowered it, the old man’s eyes were damp and shining. He was so weak she felt it necessary to physically carry his hand over his mid-section and gently lower it there.

The visitors stood, basking in long-overdue healing.

Anek’s smile did not waver. The tears quivered there, on the verge of falling from his eyelids onto his cheeks, yet hung suspended from their wrinkled perch.

A long moment passed.

Anek did not move even a hundredth of an inch.

Jacob had been standing quietly in the corner, and he stood still as stone as Hadassah’s eyes shifted over to meet his. He acknowledged her, yet did not alter his expression. Even more deliberately, he glanced over at Ari.

Ari had not moved, yet the instant Jacob saw his face, he knew that the man had not missed what was taking place. Just like his father’s, Ari’s eyes were filled with tears.

They coursed down his cheeks but did not diminish his smile. A smile that precisely matched the satisfied grin permanently gripping the face on the body now lying before him.

A high-pitched tone on the heart monitor replaced the beeping that had long ago faded into the background. The nurse rushed forward, pried open Anek’s eyelid, grabbed his wrist with one hand, and punched a wall button with the other.

Her frantic call was hardly even heard by those standing around her, facing the bed in a deep, satisfied silence.

Chapter Fifty-five

B
AGHDAD
S
QUARE—LATER THAT AFTERNOON

H
olding high a worn
and weathered document in the harsh desert sun’s glare, Ari al-Khalid stood before several dozen television cameras and a thick bundle of microphones in the very center of Baghdad.

“I hold in my hand,” he shouted into a brisk desert wind, “definitive proof that the blood of David and the lineage of the Exilarch both flow through my veins as a result of my descent from Mordecai of Persia. Also a faxed affidavit from the Rabbi of Jerusalem attesting to the historical veracity of this assertion. That is why, on this day, I hereby declare that I am the new Exilarch, leader of the Jews of the Exile, a line which began in the early days of the Babylonian Diaspora and continued unbroken through Mordecai himself and on until the mid-eighteenth century.”

A scattering of light applause and cheers broke out at those words, causing the media to turn as one toward its source. The supporters turned out to be an old man wearing a yarmulke, his elderly wife at his side, braving their Arab spectators to shout hurrahs like front-row fans at a soccer match.

“It is a mantle I wear with a great sense of honor,” he continued,
“and yet enormous responsibility. I do not grasp it for purposes of personal enrichment or aggrandizement, despite the assertions of some. And I am about to prove it.”