Hadassah Covenant, The (16 page)

Chapter Sixteen

M
ANSOUR
D
ISTRICT
, B
AGHDAD—DAWN

A
hazy sun was just
beginning to silhouette Baghdad’s distant rooftops and minarets, but the inhabitants of the well-kept home in the city’s upscale Mansour District were still in their beds asleep.

A rumpled red pickup came down the street and cruised slowly by the home. Four white-robed men in the extended cab stared briefly but intently at the edifice and its surrounding neighbors. Not a soul was about on the block. The Americans weren’t within a half mile. No movement from the house.

The pickup circled the block and returned.

On this pass, it stopped in front of the house and three of the men jumped out holding AK–47s at their midsections. The fourth hefted a missile launcher to his right shoulder. A shrill scream rang out, and the morning stillness turned into a nightmare.

First the missile whooshed into the home’s front window and set off a blast that caused the entire structure to burst apart with a roar of fire and smoke. Then the automatics kicked in, spraying the ruin with a lethal matrix of ricocheting bullets and crisscrossing dust trails.

More screams arose—whether from aroused neighbors or dying
inhabitants was hard to tell. Barking dogs added to the cacophony of sounds. A robed woman appeared in a yard two houses away, waving her arms wildly.

The men jumped back in the vehicle and it raced away.

The enraged woman ran to the edge of the rubble and raised her fists to the sky.

“Why, O Allah, why!” she screamed in Arabic. “A good Shiite home! A good Iraqi family! What could they have done? What could they have
possibly
done?”

She turned away, her anger turned to tears as more neighbors began to emerge from their yards. An American Bradley Fighting Vehicle nudged its front bumper carefully around the far corner, its machine-gun barrel trained sideways along the street.

Not ten yards from where the neighbor stood lay the hidden answer to her anguished questions—the remnants of the home’s inner doorpost. There, along the demolished right beam of the doorframe, lay a polished, highly ornamented strip of wood. The neighbor probably would never have recognized it had she been invited in, which she never had been, for although the family was respectable, they were also highly private people. She probably would not have guessed the truth even had she noticed, curling out from its incinerated edges, a strip of paper bearing nearly illegible lines in a language she would not have recognized. To be precise, they were Hebrew passages from the
Shema Yisroel
, more commonly known as the book of Deuteronomy.

Together, the cryptic shards formed the remains of a discreetly mounted
Mezuzah
, the sign of a conservative Torah-keeping family.

A Jewish family deep in hiding. Or so they had thought.

A
L
-S
AYED
I
MPORT
-E
XPORT
C
OMPANY
, B
AGHDAD—THAT EVENING

Barely an hour after the massacre of a hidden Jewish family three miles away in Mansour, the same dingy pickup pulled up in front of the unassuming storefront that housed the Mossad’s secret Iraqi headquarters.

This time there was no leisurely reconnoiter. Along the busy street outside, the truck, traveling no faster than most, braked to a sudden halt. This time six men jumped out from the cab. They did not wait for the instant stampede of bystanders, sidewalk merchants, and loiterers to scramble away from the scene before starting their rampage.

This time two missiles shrieked into the building and detonated in a single, punctuated explosion, followed two seconds later by a fireball so vicious and huge that it crossed the street and rose high into the sky, not only turning over the hapless pickup onto its assassins, but also scorching innocent traffic, passersby snarled in the ambush and everything else in its path.

Before he died, the truck’s driver praised Allah in a final strangled shout: “Praise him—we truly did strike the Zionist anthill. . . . ”

P
RIME
M
INISTER’S
R
ESIDENCE
—R
EHAVIA
, J
ERUSALEM

The following morning Hadassah began her quest in earnest. Armed with nothing more than a mug of hot Earl Grey tea, a telephone, and a pad of paper, she installed herself in the small office provided for her in a corner of the Residence complex.

She sat down in her deepest chair, took a long sip of tea, and closed her eyes to think.

“
She did not perish. . . .
”

She knew to keep it simple. Start with the familiar, the logical. In what context had she most often heard the phrase’s defining word “perish,” uttered by her father during his life? And which of these contexts would be important enough to consume his final breath, his last words to her?

Perish
. . . The word was almost Torahlike in its formality, its sentimentality. She thought back to her earliest Seder memories. His holding her on his knee, telling her stories from the Torah.

Hearing the Megillah read at Purim—Esther’s most courageous words, “
If I perish, I perish. . . . ”

Then later, the word would punctuate stories from his own life. . . .

Perish
. . . The word seemed to sink deeper into her memory. And then something burst into her mind. It was his voice, as clear and full of import as the day he had spoken the words. “My sister Rivke, my grandmother and grandfather, my uncle Likul, my own dear mother, they stayed behind when we escaped Hungary. And they
perished
in the camps. . . . ” She had winced, because in his solemnity he had used the same intonation he affected when he read from Esther.

Of course
, she told herself. He had never failed to use that verb when he had described the horrible fate of the relatives he had heart-breakingly left behind in Hungary.

Perhaps there
had
been a survivor. It made no immediate sense that she would not have been told of one. But if there had been some reason, some bizarre segregation for safety’s sake, it certainly would justify his eagerness to disclose it to her as he lay dying.

She jotted down the names as best she could remember them, feeling as though she was recreating the family names upon the scroll back at the Shrine. Maybe there would be an obvious skip—a missing link. Who else could the “she” be?

She thought hard, picturing those names—
Rivke Kesselman. Isaac and Deborah Kesselman, Likul Kesselman, Pavel Kesselman
, she mentally recited.

She would start with the first. Rivke, his father’s youngest sister. Hadassah had been told little of her, except that she was very beautiful and possessed of an enchanting wit. Poppa had sometimes looked at his Hadassah a certain way, murmuring that she reminded him “of Rivke. . . . ”

She opened her laptop, loaded its Web browser, and marveling again at the ease of it all, typed in
http://www.yadvashem.org
—the address for Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. And there it was, right on the home page, over a heartrending drawing of a smiling young girl.

“The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. Click here.”

She typed the name, clicked, and to her surprise, two matches flashed onscreen.
Riveka Keselman
, from Ukraine, and
Ryvka Keselman
from Lithuania. Neither was the one. She felt a pang of sadness to think that so many women had died that even a specific name like Rivka could encompass three different women from three nations.

The Yad Vashem Web site warned that only half of the Shoah’s total victims were loaded into its database, so she did not allow herself to feel discouragement. She continued on to the other family names and found their records without effort. Seeing them onscreen like that—disembodied in their glowing pixels, yet so real, the letters of the names so precisely formed—brought a flood of tears to her eyes. She had known none of them, of course, but she had felt their presence throughout her childhood and their loss in every year of her adulthood. And reading their names on a government Web site of this sort seemed to make the injustice of their murders fresh and raw again.

“I promise you, I will never forget,” she whispered, her voice breaking as she touched the screen with a trembling finger. She felt as if she was joining the ranks of those from the past, the present, and the future as she said aloud, “And I will fight to the death to stop anything like that from happening again. . . . ”

And then her phone rang. It was Jacob, fresh from an intelligence briefing. His voice was both professional and personal, she noted in a detached manner. It seemed Ari Meyer—the man who had saved her life and been sent back to the front for his troubles—had just perished in a horrific attack upon Mossad’s Baghdad headquarters. Positive identification would not be completed for weeks, if ever, for the explosion of hidden weapons and ammunition had been so severe, it had exceeded the kilotonnage of a plane-dropped bomb.

Then barely able to say the words, he told her that Ari Meyer had been scheduled for his return briefing the very moment the missiles had struck.

Hadassah thanked her husband and hung up without her customary “I love you,” trembling too hard to press the phone’s OFF button.

She could not understand what was happening—only that whatever it was, she was beginning to feel as though she could be in the center of a giant, global bull’s-eye.

And just at that moment, the panic returned full-force. She felt a vast, malevolent force, so hate-filled that it would not rest until its victim was destroyed. It encircled her, even here in her very own little office. It seemed to be stalking her, circling her body with the cold
stare of a Bengal tiger, preparing to leap the final gap and devour her whole.

She gulped air in huge breaths, telling herself in one absurd moment that passing out from hyperventilation might be the most merciful conclusion to this moment.

She stood up, unable to tolerate the constriction of a sitting position upon her diaphragm. Glancing up at the ceiling to change her view, she found no solace. So she stared down at the floor. And there it was again, waiting for her.

She reached down. Jacob had ordered a bound copy of the Esther letter discovered by Meyer—she picked it up and opened to a random page.

Concubine
.

Have you ever noticed, Leah, that I never speak that word out loud? I don’t think it has left my lips for thirty years or more. I detest that word. As someone who had spent most of her adult life within the royal palace, I know better than anyone what it conjures up in people’s minds. . . .

Sexual object. Plaything. Discarded at will. Used. Unwanted. Forgotten. Taken for granted
.

Forgive me if even writing these words causes you more pain. But I write them now to strip them of their power, their illusion of truth. They not only fail to describe you but actually suggest the opposite of what you truly are.

Do you know what I see in you instead of these pathetic idiocies?

I see a tall Jewish beauty with piercing green eyes, dazzling black hair, and long, lean limbs, whose loveliness is amply matched by her wisdom and her godliness. A bright, resourceful young woman making the best of events not of her own making. Still in her prime, a woman entering some difficult times in her life—times that I understand well, for I have only begun to step away from similar trials myself.

You know, I said something like this to Jesse a while back, before I came to Jerusalem, for he too is given to such questions. I still refer
to him by his Jewish name and not Hathach, as he is now known. And Mordecai too, for that matter.

Jesse and I were enjoying one of our frequent excursions to the Persepolis palace gardens—substituting them for the old familiar orchards from Susa, where we once stole away as young people so long ago—when he turned to me with a suddenly intense expression.

“Do you know that you and Mordecai are the only ones alive who remember me before I became a . . .”

Like me, he never speaks aloud the word
eunuch
, the word the outside world would use to describe him. Whenever the subject arises, he always allows the sentence to drift off in a tellingly deliberate way. And I always know what has remained unspoken.

“Jesse,” I answered, suddenly grasping his hand, “do you know who I see when I look into your eyes?”

“Please, Hadassah. I do not want to hear that word.”

“That word was the farthest thing from my mind.”

I winced at my boldness, and for a moment wondered if my point would prove healing or merely painful. Yet I had launched into the topic, and I needed to carry it through.

“I see a man as magnificent today as he ever was. I see the man you really are—who you still are—during all the time I’ve known you since childhood. In that noble brow of yours, in the intelligence pouring from those deep-set eyes, in your glowing skin, I still see the Jesse I knew at fifteen. The same youth with those great broad shoulders, the thick hair, that irresistible, lightning-quick laugh. The boy who first taught me about”—and I turned suddenly shy, and the last word was barely a whisper—“love.”