Stateless (56 page)

Mustafa nodded. There was nothing more to say. All these two young men could do – one a Muslim, one a Jew; one a Palestinian and one an Israeli – was stare out into the land of Israel, the land of hope, and beyond into the land of Palestine and the eternity of history. And wonder.

Pablo Picasso said ‘Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.' In the tough commercial world of publishing, the route of safety is all too often the path dictated. Not so with the stellar team at Simon and Schuster Australia, who saw the daring vision that we presented, and said, ‘Yes, let's do it.' So to Lou Johnson, Larissa Edwards, Roberta Ivers, Laurie Ormond, Jo Butler and Jo Jarrah go my most sincere thanks for their confidence, support and advice in the Heritage Trilogy, of which
Stateless
is the second book.

My thanks and admiration also to Harold and Rebecca Finger for their continued backing and encouragement. And to Mike Jones, an amazing co-author, whose leaps of imagination often caused him to crash through the ceiling.

My love for their wisdom and understanding go to my wife Eva, and children Georgina, Jonathan and Raffe, for bearing with me on this long journey to the City on a Hill.

Alan Gold

No one writes a book alone, and this book has enjoyed the enormous support of a wonderful circle of collaborators. We could ask for no better partners than our publishers Simon and
Schuster Australia – Lou Johnson, Larissa Edwards, Roberta Ivers and the whole S&S team. Likewise Harold Finger, for his passion and faith. Of course, I have to thank my co-writer Alan for having me along to contribute to this wild project he dreamed up. And finally, and most of all, my eternal thanks and love go to Leonie for everything, always and forever.

Mike Jones

LOOKING FOR ANOTHER GREAT READ?

If you missed
Bloodline,
the first story in the Heritage series, read on for a taste of the first chapter of this epic thriller of power, corruption and family

Two families … One bloodline … and a city named Jerusalem

When Bilal HaMizri, a radicalised Palestinian youth, is shot during a botched terrorist attack, his life is saved by a young Jewish surgeon, Yael Cohen. But when Yael makes the startling discovery that her DNA is identical with Bilal's, they become caught up in a high-stakes conspiracy — a disturbing plot that will blow the region to pieces and stun the world with its audacity.

But unknown to Bilal and Yael, theirs is the last and bloody chapter in a story that crosses millennia. Century after century, two ancient families —bloodline ancestors of Yael and Bilal — defied the corrupt power of kings and conquerors, and their struggles forged a fiercely proud people and an enduring hope for peace. But through war and atrocity, kinships were shattered, forcing dynasties apart and allowing evil to gain a foothold.

And in modern Israel, confronted with exposure, those sinister forces will do anything to take control of the Holy Land and silence Yael and Bilal, who must run for their lives. Through imprisonment, assassination attempts and political machinations, they must ultimately confront the truth of who they are.

But is blood enough?

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16 October 2007

S
litting the man's throat wasn't the problem. Bilal waited, watching the Jew enemy shift position in his chair, and fought to overcome his rising panic by remembering the lessons he'd been taught. One hand over the man's mouth to stop him screaming as the knife in the other hand sliced through the soft tissue of the throat and all the blood vessels. Keep the hand tightly over his mouth for at least a minute for the lifeblood to drain away. He'd practised the movement in his bedroom until he was fluid as a dancer.

Bilal crouched and held his breath as the Jew, remembering his duty, stood, scratched himself, walked around his position glancing left and right, up and down, made certain that everything was in order, and then sat again. Bilal saw the man looking directly upwards to the white walls of the ancient city of Jerusalem and the golden mosque beyond; but what was he thinking? And did it matter?

The panorama in front of Bilal made his heart beat in excitement. The massive walls of the Old City that surrounded the Temple of Solomon gleamed white in the glow of the arc lights. The moon was a thin crescent over the distant mountain ridge.
In his rising panic, he tried to calm himself by remembering what his imam had taught him. That the great Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had built those walls and Bilal even remembered the date: 1538. It was impossibly long ago. Bilal couldn't even understand how long. But it all seemed so grand and old.

Above the walls was the grey-blue dome of the third holiest site in Islam, the Al Aqsa Mosque. And beyond that, the gleaming golden cupola of the
Masjid Qubbat As-Sakhrah
, the Dome of the Rock, both mosques the symbol of Islam's ancient claim to the city of Jerusalem. Bilal found himself imagining pictures from the stories he'd been told since a child, of Mohammed tethering his wondrous horse al-Buraq, with its head of a woman, wings of an eagle, tail of a peacock and hoofs reaching to the horizon, before ascending on his journey to heaven.

‘Peace and Blessings be Upon Him,' Bilal murmured under his breath as a reverential reflex to using Mohammed's name. But Bilal's mission wasn't to pray. He prayed every Friday in his own mosque and lately, urged on by his imam so that he could familiarise himself with the terrain, he prayed in the Al Aqsa. No, today his mission was to begin taking back Jerusalem; to take revenge on the Jews who had dispossessed his family, destroyed his homeland, made his people into paupers, imprisoned his brother as a terrorist, and cast him as a refugee.

Jerusalem's night air was cold, but he felt comfort and warmth when he remembered being in the mosque of Bayt al Gizah, his village just across the valley, sitting at the feet of the imam a month ago, along with twenty other young men from his village. The imam sat cross-legged on a cushion, surrounded by Bilal and his friends on the carpet. His imam was smiling and talking with such ease and confidence about the splendours they would each experience in the afterlife; but then his face and voice became severe as he spoke of the way in which their people, the Palestinian people, were daily abused and murdered,
tortured and brutalised by the Jews. He asked each youth on his way home that night to glance over the valley towards the city of Jerusalem; to look at the glory of the mosques, one gold and the other silver, their subtlety and quiet beauty, and then to look at the gaudy, tawdry and immoral modern city the infidels had built. One day it would be gone.

When they were leaving the mosque, the imam asked Bilal to wait. At first he thought the imam had made a mistake, confusing him with one of the older boys who Bilal so looked up to. But from the moment he spoke, Bilal knew that his words were for him, and him alone. Barely able to breathe, the young man wondered why the imam had held him back. Was it because of the way he worshipped? Was it to ask him to do a job? Was it to say something now that he was approaching his eighteenth birthday? It was none of these.

‘Allah has chosen you for a special purpose, Bilal.'

The boy made no response but his heart thudded in his chest. Of all the prospects of hope and excitement that the sentence suggested, it was the sound of his own name from the imam's lips that filled him with the greatest pride and settled any doubt that his holy teacher spoke only to him. His shoes were worn near through, his family wasn't rich and he'd long since stopped going to school. But there, staring up at the imam, he felt for a moment like a prince.

‘You will be among the blessed. You, Bilal, will be a hero to our people, the pride of your mother and father. You will strike a blow from which the enemy will never recover. And I will ensure that your name is inscribed in the holiest of holy books and kept in pride of place in Mecca.'

‘Me? My name?' Bilal could barely speak.

The imam smiled and put his hand on the young man's shoulder. ‘You, my son. Though I've only been your leader for a year, I have grown to love you and the other young men
who have flocked to sit at my feet and listen to the words of Mohammed, Peace and Blessings be Upon Him. And in these past months, you, as well as a number of others, have impressed me, Bilal. You will lead the fight of our people against the Zionist enemy. Soon, I will inform you of a mission I wish you to undertake.'

Close to tears of pride, Bilal whispered, ‘I won't let you down, Master. This, I swear.'

And during the month, the imam and the mosque's bomb-maker had worked hard to ensure that Bilal's mission would be successful. His training done, his prayers said, his will written, his face and voice recorded for all the world to admire on the internet, Bilal stood in the shadow of the wall with the imam's words still fresh in his ears. He smiled to himself as he waited and watched the Israeli guard shift his position protecting the entrance that led into the tunnel. He ached to strike a blow for the freedom of his oppressed people, to reclaim his land from the Jews. He lived a degraded life in a crowded village while just over the valley the Jews lived in luxury houses and had maids and manservants and wore gold jewellery and drove expensive foreign cars around a city that should have been his.

Bilal was a Palestinian but his culture told him he was born a refugee because of the 1948 war, and the war of 1968, and the war of 1972, and the other wars waged by fearless Arab armies to push the Jews back into the sea. Each war, each attempt to eliminate the Jewish presence from Palestine, had ended in failure and misery, but the Jews were few, and the Arabs were many and they could wait for a hundred, even a thousand years to win, but win they surely would, according to his imam.

And so Bilal waited patiently for the right time to kill the Jew. He hated waiting, but his imam had told him that patience and judging the moment were more important to his mission than rashly moving forward and exposing himself to the enemy.

The Jew guard seemed to relax; he moved his head in a circular direction as though massaging his neck muscles, put down his rifle from his shoulder to his lap, and reached down to a Thermos; he poured himself a drink and Bilal saw the steam coming out of the cup. As the man lifted it to drink the coffee, Bilal slipped his knife from its scabbard, ran forward silently to cover the twenty-metre distance between himself and the Jew enemy, and before the man even knew that his life was in peril, Bilal put a hand over his mouth, pulled his head back and sliced his throat in a gash of crimson from ear to ear.

Bilal kept his hand over the man's mouth so that he couldn't scream and embraced his body firmly against his own to prevent him from struggling. Even though seated, Bilal could barely constrain the tough body flailing against imminent death. He felt it through the shirt. It was a hard body, a strong body. Not a body-builder's physique with constructed muscles only good for posturing and lifting weights; no, this was the taut body of a man who'd done physical work all his life. Compact, tight, beautiful.

He put his face close to the Jew's, smelling his sweat and fear and blood. And in the moonlight, Bilal saw that he wasn't a westerner, but a Yemenite, a Moroccan or maybe even a black Ethiopian Jew — certainly a Jew with Arab blood but difficult to tell without the daylight sun. Bilal felt a moment of empathy with the man. It was different killing an Arab Jew from killing one from Germany or Russia or America. As he held the man's increasingly limp body, he worried that he'd killed one of his own, but the man wore an Israeli Border Police uniform, and that made him the enemy, no matter where he'd been born.

With his hand still over the man's mouth, Bilal held him closely until he felt no more struggling. Just a body, slumped in his chair, the stench of urine, coffee, blood mingling in the cold night air, making Bilal want to gag.

Alan Gold
is an internationally published and translated author of fifteen novels, his most recent being
Bell of the Desert
, published in 2014 in the USA. He speaks regularly to national and international conferences on a range of subjects, most notably the recent growth of antisemitism. He was a delegate at the notorious United Nations World Conference on Racism and Xenophobia held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 and has addressed UN conferences and meetings, as well as speaking throughout the world to universities and community groups.

Alan is a regular contributor to
The Australian
,
The Spectator
and other media as an opinion columnist and literary critic, as well as being a lecturer and mentor at the masters and doctoral degree level in creative writing at major universities.