the sword with its streak of fire, although he had seldom taken it from the hiding place and the tapestry sheath. He had carried it in his heart along with Jamila—perhaps that was why he had lost her—and he had carried it through the long legal wars in courts from The Hague to Jerusalem. For a long time he had carried it in trust for Nasir and perhaps for his son after him, although he now had no hope of seeing Nasir’s children. People who thought the sanctuaries were safe for all time were as deluded as those who expected that the Israelis at any moment would take it in their heads to do the worst they were capable of. He had walked the careful path of Suleiman, refusing to acquiesce to the inner rage, staying watchful in the courts—at times even revealing a glimpse of the blade—until the day when the Rightful One would claim his own.
His duty was ended now. After tonight, he could sleep.
Nasir came into the room. “I got Amal to school.”
Hafiz stirred, pulling himself up on his couch. “You should have a word with the teacher in the madrassah,” he said wearily. “Amal is likely to hit him one day.”
Nasir gave a loud chuckle. He wanted to keep things light while he scanned the news on TV. With the sound on mute, the screen would not bother Hafiz, who was becoming noticeably less wakeful the last few mornings.
“Why are you watching television in the middle of the day?” his father asked from the couch.
“I want to see the news.”
Hafiz settled back motionless again. Using his GeM to control the flatscreen, Nasir scrolled quickly through frozen images from a dozen news broadcasts of the last few days. Like train windows, the images flashed past of the dead Pope sprawled on a staircase, of suitably solemn world leaders, of authorities both PA and Israeli deploring what had happened; and then of lesser figures and lesser stories.
There it was. He had paid little attention to it. The others at the station had made fun of him. Tuesday, 1000 hours—the item’s first appearance. He scrolled through several more appearances during the day and stopped to study one of them.
When Hafiz awoke again, Nasir was gone. It was not right to say he had been sleeping—only dozing. He had been thinking of Nasir’s mother, of Jamila; he had locked her away in his heart so long before. His uncle had questioned the wisdom of the marriage, of the passion Hafiz felt for Jamila, in light of the work Hafiz was to do. But his uncle needn’t have worried, because Hafiz did his work strictly and seriously. When a child was not forthcoming, he had adopted one, reared him, and trained him. He had now added forty years to the eight centuries of peace on the holy mount: no new Crusade had been allowed to form, even in the worst of times, even amid worldwide jihad.
He had managed the repercussions of the attack on al-Aqsa, which had nearly brought him to the grave. In truth, Hafiz smiled to himself, it had brought him to the grave. Drunken with rage, the others were demanding the worst. The practice of diplomatic delicacy had exhausted him to the point where the carrion birds in his blood freed themselves and now preyed steadily on him.
It was martyrdom of a sort, he smiled to himself.
One day his uncle Haytham had made the ultimate sacrifice, which he had expected to do. Consumed by two wars, worn out by the insistent pull of martyrdom, he died in the first Intifada. After the one-eyed Zionist general in 1967, Munich in 1972, the disastrous Egyptian attack in 1973—but the Intifada was a new thing. Haytham was exhausted by the frenzy, the stones in the air, the decapitations, and the red craters in the mud. One day he had collapsed in the street and died under the wheels of an IDF van—an accident, they said.
That was the beginning of the forty years. From that day, he had carried the weight of the gold ring on his hand.
The world continued, a cancer in remission one day and fulminating the next. A Jewish dentist murdered worshipers in the mosque at Hebron. Palestinian children blew themselves up in the markets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Rabin was assassinated. Rockets flew over Gaza and Israel. Between outbreaks, Hafiz struggled to keep a lock on his anger. It was beyond comprehension. The Americans lavished money on the Zionists, moved their embassy to Jerusalem, and refused to open their eyes. The Zionists talked themselves deaf about their liberty and their security. It was as the Prophet had said—God might as well have given the precious treasures of the Torah and the Gospel to an ass. In time, there was the excursion to Norway—on a private airplane—and at last Jamila awaiting him as he floated to the ground at Amman. It was compensation enough.
Jamila’s father kept a peacock in his garden in East Jerusalem, and Hafiz had heard the peacock’s cry many mornings from his house. The families had long known each other; it was only natural for Jamila’s father to agree to the marriage, even though Hafiz’s father had lost his property. Among the leading families there was an understanding about Hafiz, and the family of Jamila welcomed him. Although she had traveled widely, had attended university in New York City, the instinct for home was strong in her. The peacock, the bird of Suleiman, had brought them back together, he joked.
He took walks with Jamila in the evenings among the sedative trees of the Mount of Olives, and she came to understand hazily why he wore the ring and why he kept his eye on the Qubbet. Above them, the Dome receded into the sunset; at these times, the oath he had sworn melted from his memory with the last rays of day. Then, on a blue afternoon in the fall, when he was walking there with Jamila, an explosion slashed the air from the direction of the city. The Israelis had decided to open an ancient tunnel along the base of the Temple Mount, and there was rioting in the Muslim quarter. Many bombs followed that one; for months, he worked harder than ever before, but then the Second Intifada began, and with it his wife’s long decline and the painfully sweet adoption of Nasir. She could not have children, but she had desperately wanted Nasir—if only to fill the emptiness that was coming for Hafiz.
For forty years, he had worn the ring while the darkness gathered and deepened around him. King Suleiman had used his ring to summon the jinn, enslaving them to build his great mosque. The cry of the bird of Suleiman would announce the Last Day, it was said. It was time now, thought Hafiz. It was past time. Martyrs prepare themselves for forty days; surely forty years was more than enough.
Hafiz had put on his uncle’s ring just before he buried him and had never taken it off. But he had wanted Nasir to have a new ring. There was too much blood on the old one. He had told Nasir to bury him with the old ring and thus bury the old blood. Hafiz had hoped to wear it until the Day—now that hope was in his son.
Simon Winter Centre for Genetic Research, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1015h
Joseph Rappaport closed his eyes for a few moments. At last the chaos caused by Emanuel Shor’s death was settling—files closed, police gone, himself appointed temporary Director. He had spent the morning putting his electronic signature on documents, including dozens of applications for information from the Cohanim database, all from America. As soon as possible, he would shunt this duty off on the assistant directors. The whole thing bored him.
Rappaport had never understood Manny Shor’s obsession with the old Cohanim database. It had been well picked over for years by snobs, genealogists, and medical people researching obscure diseases.
To Rappaport, the monoamine oxidase project was so much more compelling. To experiment with the genes that made people violent, that moved them to hatred—monoamine research promised to get at the root of this ancient curse. Some of Rappaport’s distant cousins from Venice had been transported and exterminated in the closing days of the Holocaust. Even growing up near New York, he himself had felt from some people an occasional coolness, the barest hint of disapproval of his face, of his name. Then, late one day in the time of Trump, he had gone from the lab to his tiny office in the Life Sciences building to find a drawing of a swastika hanging on the
