Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (26 page)

As officiating clergy at many funerals, Gabby
felt compelled to conceal her personal grief until alone, making
the loss of a friend or associate all the more painful. Her job as
an officiating rabbi was to conduct the funeral with the utmost
dignity so that others, not herself, could mourn properly. But now
stripped of her rabbinical role, she was free to express her grief
with the other mourners. Upon first learning of Tim's death, she
had felt a sense of shock. Then, as she learned more details of his
murder, this turned into anger. In the six days between his death
and the memorial service, these feelings morphed into a haunting
sadness. It would have been easier, she believed, had she been able
to understand the mystery of his disappearance, but Zvi Zabronski's
department released few details. Through it all, she could not
escape blaming herself for what had happened.

Itamar offered to accompany her to the
service, but she declined. As the hour neared, she feared meeting
friends she had purposely avoided since her arrival in Jerusalem.
What explanation could she give for not calling? And how should she
respond to their condolences? With nothing to do but dwell on her
loss, she walked alone from Rehavia across town, arriving at the
Bethany Church over an hour early. That the sun had been hiding
behind low clouds for two days, obscuring the natural sheen of the
Holy City's limestone fascia, compounded her sadness.

As she approached the church, she barely
noticed an old man sitting on an apartment stoop because he looked
similar to thousands of elderly Hasidim who had made their homes in
the neighborhood. He was hunched over as if suffering from lower
back pain, holding with quivering fingers a small black book. As
she strolled through the church garden of bougainvillea and
frangipani, he labored to stand by grabbing onto a window ledge and
using both arms to pull himself up. Once steadied on his feet, he
looked directly at Gabby and offered a smile without opening his
lips, then hobbled toward her.

"I know who you are," he said in a low,
guttural voice laced with a Yiddish accent. "Timothy spoke about
you often. A rabbi, yes?" The word
rabbi
stuck in his throat as though difficult to pronounce.

She reached forward to shake his hand in
greeting, but he refused to accept it. "And you are?" she said,
showing no umbrage.

"Schreiber," he answered.

One word, one name, one Hasidic face. That
was all Gabby needed to identify this stranger. She had always
suspected that Tim had collaborated with a Talmudist to write his
book. "I know who you are, too," she said.

"You shouldn't. He promised never to tell
anybody, even you."

"Tim never did. I know what he was capable
of. There had to be a Torah scholar helping him. That made the most
sense."

Schreiber glanced around as though afraid to
be seen in a churchyard, especially talking with an attractive,
unmarried woman, someone who called herself a rabbi. Not a
rebbitzin
, mind you, but a full-fledged
rabbi. "Timothy left in my cousin's Volkswagen. He never returned.
More than a week. I worried, but what could I do? He spoke to me
about how he feared the future. I read about him in the
papers."

She half-turned toward the church, waving a
hand for him to follow. "You'll come for the prayers?" she
asked.

He staggered, barely able to hold himself
erect, and nodded no. "I cannot go there."

She felt embarrassed for suggesting it. For a
Hassid to enter, much less pray, in a church was sacrilegious.
Schreiber could work with a Presbyterian minister and talk with a
female rabbi, but entering a church was a line he could never
cross. "What happened to your work with Timothy?" she asked.

"Nothing. Now it won't be finished. He came
to me with more words and phrases on a computer disk. Clusters,
single words, individual letters. We were assembling them into
verses. He gave me an envelope if anything happened to him. I
didn't open it, hoping he would return. But when I read of his
death in the papers, I did. He told me to give you these new words
and phrases. He made it clear you would know what to do with them.
There's a personal letter for you in the envelope."
The idea of
inheriting Tim's fragments had never occurred to her. Gabby's first
thought was that this was stolen property. She asked Rabbi
Schreiber, "Original texts or copies?"

"Copies. I haven't seen originals of
anything."

She sighed in relief. If Tim didn't have the
originals, who did? It occurred to her that perhaps they never
existed, that the computer copies were fake. But upon further
thought, she rejected the idea. Tim, more than any scholar in the
field, would have known the difference between genuine and bogus
material.

She asked, "Could I come and see them?"

"You can read them?" he asked, expressing
astonishment.

"Better then Timothy, I believe."

He thought about that for a long while, then
recited his address. 46 Haydam Street, Apartment Gimel. His phone
number followed. "I will give you everything Timothy had."

She repeated the address and phone number to
engrave them in her memory, planning to write them down at the
first opportunity. "Tomorrow, I'm taking Tim's body to his family
in the States. I'm planning to return to Jerusalem in a few weeks.
Can you wait for me?"

His eyes glimmered with a touch of mirth.
"Why, only a few weeks! These fragments are two thousand years old.
Of course they can wait a bit longer!"

"Won't you change your mind about attending
the service for Tim?"

He stepped back, shaking his head, then
turned around and slowly shuffled away.

Father Benoit Matteau's Arab chauffeur now drove his
Subaru. Gabby noticed him drive past the church, looking for a
parking space. On the second attempt, he dropped off the Dominican
priest near the garden entrance. Simultaneously, other mourners,
many of whom Gabby didn't recognize, began showing up. Father
Benoit walked with ramrod posture despite chronic pain in his hip.
As he approached, he opened his arms to Gabby, as though he were
prepared to wrap them around her for comfort. She stepped back
before he reached her, skeptical but dutifully polite. "Good day,
Father," she said.

"A sad one," he replied. "The Lord doesn't
make many men as good as Timothy Matternly. He has left a giant
shadow over biblical scholarship."

Gabby nodded in agreement, searching for
words to reflect her feelings. Before Tim's murder, Father Benoit
was the one person who could have been helpful in locating him. How
was it possible for Tim to have been in Cave XII without this
well-informed priest knowing? The thought had often crossed her
mind that he also knew about Tim's
discovery of a
lifetime
. And perhaps about his death.

"We need to talk," he said. "Not now, of
course, but after Timothy is properly at rest in Heaven."

"I'm taking him home to Massachusetts," she
said in a response sharper than was her habit, especially during a
time of mourning.

"A loving gesture. Everybody needs someone to
take them on the final journey. Will you return to Jerusalem?"

"Hopefully, in a few weeks. I must first
visit with the sponsors of my thesis in Chicago. And spend time
with my family in Los Angeles who believe I've abandoned them
altogether."

"Then, I'll call in three weeks. Come, have
lunch with me in Bethlehem."

From a side path through the garden, Itamar
was arriving at the church. He stepped over to Gabby and drew her
into a polite embrace before acknowledging Father Benoit with an
artificial smile, as if to indicate that this was not the right
time to air their differences. Several members of Benoit's faculty,
dressed in black suits with stiff white clerical collars, also
approached in small groups. They spoke in French, but switched to
Hebrew and English as they extended their condolences.

In the sanctuary, Tim's friends and
colleagues sat meditatively in the pews while a choir sang Tim's
favorite hymns. Reverend Ganz opened his service with an extended
interval of silence so the mourners could remember the deceased
privately. Psalms from the Old Testament and parables from the New.
After a short eulogy in which Reverend Ganz sketched the family
life and career of a fellow minister and scholar of great repute,
he asked if members of the congregation would share their
thoughts.

Gabby, who was sitting beside Itamar, tried
to hide, but the reverend's eyes caught hers, filling her with
resolve. She rose in her pew and swept up the mourners with her
eyes, then in a clear voice, unaffected by the tears that flowed
along her cheeks, said, "Many of you knew Tim as a friend and
scholar, a man passionately interested in the past. A man who
believed with all his heart in another mortal who lived nearby some
two thousand years ago. To Tim, Jesus was a beacon, guiding others
by his supreme example of love.

"But I had the good fortune to know another
part of him. As Jesus was his beacon, he was mine. I don't
understand why he was taken from us so soon. Someday, perhaps,
we'll know more. But for now, I must say goodbye to a wonderful
human being. And to you, I say from my own Jewish tradition, 'May
the Lord comfort us all among the legions of mourners who grieve
for their loved ones.'"

She sat down, closed her eyes, gathering
together a hundred sadnesses. Itamar took her hand and squeezed
gently. She returned the gesture with even more pressure.

***

Under an overcast sky in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, Tim’s funeral was a solemn parting, his family still
confused by his premature death. Gabby spent two days with his
mother and sister, allowing herself the luxury of weeping openly
with them. They had many questions, only a few of which she could
answer to their satisfaction. Officiating at funerals had been an
integral part of her previous rabbinical duties, yet no amount of
doctrinal wisdom prepared her for the emotional freefall. Time, as
she had learned, was the only healer and, at the moment, not nearly
enough had passed.

She volunteered to ship from Israel Tim's
personal belongings and left with his sister keys to their home in
Chicago with an invitation to remove any of the Matternly family
memorabilia even before probating his will. After numerous promises
to keep his folks posted about developments in Jerusalem, the time
had come for Gabby to catch a plane for Los Angeles.

***

When Dr. Samuel Lewyn remarried after the
death of her mother, Gabby resented the woman her father had chosen
as a replacement. Her relationship with his second wife, Charlie,
was formally polite, but lacking in personal warmth. Yet over the
years, Gabby grew to appreciate the care this woman lavished on her
father and felt guilty for having been so childish early on.
Fortunately, Charlie had entered her second marriage a wise and
experienced woman, fully aware of what perils being a stepmother
might bring. As Gabby's stepmother, she would have been entitled to
carry a grudge for the shabby treatment early on, but fortunately
never did.

Upon arrival in Los Angeles, Gabby found her
father mortified by Tim’s death, acting as if this was his first
encounter with murder, which, as a practicing internist for
thirty-nine years, it certainly wasn't. While the Los Angeles visit
lasted only three days, Gabby felt good about reestablishing family
bonds, strained as they were, no longer by personality conflicts,
but by long absences.

On a plane to Chicago, she could think of
nothing but the events in Israel. Before she left, Itamar had
stressed that Tim's murder did nothing to exonerate him in the eyes
of the Antiquities Authority. By now, neither he nor the police
doubted Tim had been involved in looting Cave XII. But what he had
actually stolen remained mere speculation. For that reason, he
wrote Gabby several e-mails saying that it would be dangerous for
her to return to the Ussishkin Street apartment and inviting her to
use the guestroom in his Katamon home. She replied by declining his
hospitality and asking, "What would the neighbors say?"

"That I'm making good progress," he wrote
back.

"No," she answered in a brief message. "Be
honest, Iti. I would create gossip. And you have enough problems at
the Authority without me adding more."

She stayed in her Hyde Park home in Chicago
where Tim's ghost seemed alive in every room. The furniture, books,
and particularly the kitchen, with its butcher-block island and
hanging copper and brass pots and pans, triggered a flood of
memories. Since almost everything belonged to his heirs, the house
was certain to go up for sale once his will was probated. Their
rented apartment in Jerusalem was less complicated because only
four months remained on the lease. And she had little desire to
renew it because, while conveniently located near the center of
town, the apartment stirred too many unhappy recollections.

On the campus of the University of Chicago,
Gabby showed up early for an appointment with her thesis advisor,
Dr. Alexander Cross. While she had come prepared to talk about the
lack of progress on her dissertation, Professor Cross was
preoccupied with Tim's death, convinced that his colleague had been
a victim of foul play. He told Gabby how he had demanded that the
University president force the Department of State in Washington to
open a formal inquiry, but to date no action had been taken. When
Gabby said that she had it on good authority why the Israeli
government would do little or nothing to punish suspected Bedouin
murderers, he exploded with venom. No university in the world had
contributed more to archeology in the Holy Land than the University
of Chicago, and as a member of its distinguished faculty, Tim
Matternly deserved better treatment. The discussion in Cross's
office, once focused upon Tim, never made it to Gabby's thesis. Nor
was there any mention of her earlier feud with American evangelists
or her discussion with Professor Simon Pines and himself at the
Faculty Club before her departure for Israel.