Bloodline (10 page)

He looked at her in a mixture of amazement and incredulity but said nothing.

Yael continued on to fill the silence. “You were fantastically lucky you were here when it happened, or you'd have been very seriously ill.”

“You operated on me?”

Hearing something that wasn't an insult took Yael by surprise. “Not me. Another surgeon, head of renal. He's very good. He was—”

Bilal cut her off sharply, the details lost on him. “Why? Why did you save me? Why did you stop me from going to paradise?”

“You're going to prison, Bilal. That's a very long way from paradise.”

Bilal's jaw stiffened. “I am not afraid,” he declared with all the bravado he could muster. “The man who came to me this morning, I showed him that I wasn't afraid.”

“You didn't succeed, Bilal.” Yael's tone was remarkably soft and calm. “Your bombs didn't go off, people were spared, and you didn't die a martyr.”

Bilal's eyes narrowed.

“You failed, Bilal.” Yael's words came not as an accusation but with a tinge of sadness that surprised her as she heard her own voice. She turned to leave. But Bilal's anger rose behind her and she heard the rattle of metal as he pulled at his handcuffed wrist.

“When I see my brothers in your prison, they will greet me as a hero. They will cheer my name!”

And it was in that moment that Yael realized how naïve she had been and, worse still, how blind Bilal was. He
had
failed. He had been sent with a task to kill, and in his failure had achieved too little. Yael knew Bilal's brothers in prison would not offer him the hero's welcome he expected.

The revelation brought the reason for her visit to her mind and she turned back to the room with images of DNA strands floating in her brain. But before she could formulate questions about where his family was from and who they were, Bilal launched into a spiel.

“You say I failed. Maybe. But behind me come thousands. And they will drive you into the sea. This is not your land. It is my land. You occupy my home, you made my family into refugees, you build giant walls through the middle of our towns, and you kill my people. We live in tents, in dirt, while you live in palaces. But your time is ending!”

Yael looked at him, torn between wanting to tell him the truth and wanting answers. Before her she saw little more than a kid fed a diet of distortions that gave him an identity, a reason to be. There was no point in trying to convince a fanatic he was wrong. For Bilal, just as for many in the West, Israel was a colonizer, an aggressor, an imperialist. But the narrative he'd been taught was simplistic and naïve. Yael, too, had her own recitations. How
Palestinians tore up the UN partition plan and seven hundred thousand Jews were expelled from Arab nations and made refugees, all of whom had been absorbed into Israel and become valued citizens. She wanted him to see the hypocrisy of Syria and Egypt championing the Palestinian cause while refusing to give them citizenship, using them as tragic pawns in a twisted game for their own political ends.

But she didn't.

In that moment, with the young man in front of her, the image of their matching DNA overshadowed politics and culture and she said nothing. Moreover, she thought of the prison that awaited him and the yawning chasm between his expectations and the hard reality he faced.

Her scowl softened and instead she asked a question. “Bilal, do you know where you come from? I mean, where were you born?”

Bilal was caught off guard by the sudden change of topic and answered before he could stop himself. “I am Palestinian,” he declared.

“No, I mean specifically. In what town?”

“I was born outside Nahariya in the north of Israel. We came to Bayt al Gizah when I was two.” Again Bilal answered the question as a prisoner of war might declare his name, rank, and serial number: a kind of badge of honor, proof of his identity and purpose.

“Do you know where your father or your father's father came from?” she asked.

“We are Palestinian!” he declared once again in an elevated voice. “My father's family lived for thousands of years in Palestine. Why do you want to know, Doctor? Why is this important? You've stopped me from going to paradise. Now I'm going to prison. Why do you need to know this?”

She'd already said too much. The last thing she wanted to do was to alert him to the information that was troubling her. So
she shrugged. “It doesn't matter.” She turned and started to walk toward the door.

“I will give you no information. I gave none to the man from the government. You will get nothing out of me, Jew!”

She left his room, but instead of walking away she dallied outside his door for a moment, thinking. The security guard looked at her questioningly. She smiled at him and sneaked a final look inside Bilal's room. She'd left a boy full of bluff and bluster, mouthing hatred taught to him by older and more malicious people. But now he was lying on his hospital bed, his free arm over his eyes. She was sure he wasn't, but from the look of him he could have been sobbing.

T
HE MUSEUM'S THEATER
was big enough to be impressive but small enough to deny anonymity to anyone in the audience. Half a dozen print reporters were sitting in the front rows reading the press release. There were four television cameras in the stages of adjustment for height and focus, positioned at the back of the room. Radio reporters entered en masse and put their microphones on the table; the cords and the mics themselves reminded Yael of the head of a Gorgon.

Yael sat several rows back from the front and behind the reporters, unconsciously putting herself out of their gaze in case it turned her into stone. She never liked the spotlight and even resented speaking at the conferences and seminars that were part and parcel of her job as a surgeon. She wasn't shy and retiring, and had even received prizes in school for public speaking, but she much preferred working with a small, intimate group in an operating theater. Yet, even sitting behind them, she felt the focus of the reporters on her, probably wondering who this person was.

But her thoughts were mostly elsewhere. She wasn't thinking of the biblical seal or of the presentation to the media. She was
thinking about irregular lines on a DNA profile and then of the fragments of rock slipping from Bilal's fingers. The one-in-one-hundred-thousand coincidence, having compared his DNA with her own . . . How could he and she be so closely related they could have been brother and sister?

And every time she thought about it—whether it was driving home from the hospital or out at a Jerusalem nightclub—it kept coming back to haunt her. As a surgeon, a specialist doctor, she had access to other experts in the field, but she wasn't willing to consult with them. Any questioning of blood relationships in the fraternity of the medical profession posed the danger of her being branded a racist. So the questions kept bouncing around in her mind.

Bilal was a child of a people still living a life, an existence, that had barely changed since medieval times, in an impoverished village where nothing had changed in millennia; she was the daughter of Israeli academics and professionals. Both Yael's sets of grandparents had migrated to Israel from Russia or Germany or Austria just before the closure of the borders and the beginning of the Holocaust. Their prescience and understanding of the reality of Adolf Hitler and their luck in having been able to leave Europe had saved their lives. Before that, her mother's family had come from Latvia and her father's grandparents had been living in Russia, but the family history, because of migration and escape from persecution, was clouded in supposition and mystery. Even long before her grandparents' generation . . . She tried to remember but couldn't recall if her grandparents—all of whom, except for her beloved Shalman, were now dead—had ever told her.

Her rational side knew that DNA had nothing to do with education or status and everything to do with heritage and biology and linkages over millennia, but emotionally she couldn't equate her ancestry with that of Bilal; their worlds were so far apart. And now Bilal was waiting in the hospital for her approval, as
his doctor, to be transferred to a prison cell and into custody to await trial for murder. And when that process was complete, Bilal would disappear into the ranks of the civil dead forever. Why had she not signed the release forms? Why was she hesitating?

Her thoughts were interrupted when the door suddenly opened and in filed Shalman, followed by Dr. Zvi HaSofer, who in turn was followed by the head of the museum's ancient coins department, Dr. Sheila Ragiv, and one or two others whom Yael didn't recognize until they sat in their allotted seats and she read the nameplates arrayed in front of them.

Quite used to press conferences and wanting to keep the meeting informal, knowing that less than a minute of the conference would be used by the television stations, Shalman wished everybody good morning. “As you'll have seen from the press release, today we at the Israel Museum are delighted to announce the acquisition of a major find, an artifact dating back three thousand years to the time of Kings David and Solomon. Indeed, this is the world's first direct contemporaneous link with these two great kings. Their existence is no longer mythical or anecdotal. We now have proof positive from archaeology, not just from the Bible, that they lived.”

A huge image of the stone Yael had unearthed from the hand of Bilal was flashed up on the screen behind the speakers. For the first time Yael could see the delicacy of the inscription and the perfection of the Hebrew writing. For her, as for any child in an Israeli school, reading the inscription posed no problem, for modern Hebrew was based on the ancient letters and words of the Bible. The founders of modern Israel, faced with the problem of immigrants with different languages from dozens of different countries, used ancient Hebrew as a modernized language to unify its people.

“The inscription and its translation into English, Arabic, French, and Spanish is written for you in the press release, where we have also given a chronology of the known historical events
around the period, the meaning of the words in their three-thousand-year-old context, and the significance of this treasure to the Jewish people.

“So let me come to the find itself. This object represents one of the most important discoveries of recent biblical archaeology. This inscription is one of the earliest proofs of the Hebrew presence in Jerusalem in the reign of King Solomon. It must have been written within decades of the capture of the city by King David from the Jebusites, when Solomon the Wise, his son, ruled. This puts the date of the inscription at around the middle of the tenth century BCE, most likely around the year 958 BCE. Its archaeological importance is of the very highest order.”

The reporters did not wait for an invitation for questions and one jumped into the pause. “Who made the find?”

“It was found in debris at the top of the shaft, just before the steps that lead up to the walls of Herod's Temple,” Shalman said quickly.

“By whom? Who found it?” asked the reporter again.

“One of our people,” Shalman answered. But his evasion made the other reporters sit up and take notice.

“And the name of the archaeologist who found the object?” asked another.

Shalman breathed deeply and sighed. Yael sat uncomfortably. He knew she'd resent the attention and would berate him for it later. A silence descended on the room, broken only by the faint electrical murmur of the television cameras.

“The lady who brought it to us is sitting in the back row,” he said, nodding toward Yael.

All turned and looked at her. “Who is this lady?” asked a woman reporter from Channel 3.

“Her name is Dr. Yael Cohen,” Shalman answered. “Yael, why don't you come forward and sit with us?”

Unwillingly and uncertainly, she stood and walked to the podium. Yael was the type to draw attention, tall and slender, with
long black hair, huge eyes the color of a desert night, a sensual blend of experience and innocence in her smile, and her obvious reluctance to be in the spotlight. The questions began immediately, blending into one another.

“How did you find this stone?”

“Are you a professional archaeologist?”

“Did you sell the stone to the museum?”

“How come you found the stone? Were you digging?”

Yael stared blankly at the field of camera lenses, lights, and expectant faces. Her mind focused on the insistent questions from the reporters and she realized how pregnant was the pause she had left in the air. “No, I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a surgeon, and I'm very proud to say that I'm also Professor Shalman Etzion's granddaughter.”

“You're a surgeon?” asked a reporter. “How did you come by the stone?”

Yael looked at Shalman, who shrugged. It was too late to avoid the truth. “A young Palestinian carrying bombs was shot and arrested when he used the tunnel to gain access to the Kotel. One of the detonator caps exploded, bringing down some of the masonry. I operated on that boy and in his hand I found . . .”

W
HAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN
a half-hour press conference turned into a one-hour inquisition, with demands for separate interviews, television appearances, staged photos of Yael sitting on a desk with her skirt slightly hitched up, legs showing, pointing to the blown-up writing of the stone on the screen.

When the circus was finished, Yael prepared to leave, but found a tall, muscular reporter to whom she hadn't spoken standing nearby looking at her. She knew instantly that he was American, and from his looks had probably been a college football player. All muscle, but was there a brain?

“Dr. Cohen, could you spare me one more minute of your time?” he asked. His Hebrew was perfect but his accent jarred on her. What was it? New York? Chicago? And she was surprised by his voice. It was deep and melodious and attractive, like a baritone. But she had commitments at the hospital and she told him, “I'm sorry, I'm already late for an appointment and I don't think there's any more I can answer.”