Requiem (7 page)

'These affairs,'
Tom had said to her once, 'they never seem to give anyone any
happiness.'

'Happiness?'
Sharon had broken off crying to blow her nose. 'Happiness is never the object.'

'Then what is?'

Pause. 'Experience.'

For a
long while after that Tom thought he might be living life on the wrong note.

'So you've quit
teaching?' Sharon asked. Tom had taught since qualifying. Sharon, by contrast,
had never used her qualification. She had been a holiday courier in Spain, a
timeshare-shark in the Canary Isles, a
Butlin's
Redcoat, an adventure-playground worker, a
kibbutznik
. . . Now here she was in Israel working as a counsellor for alcoholic women.
Along the way she'd picked up some kind of diploma in psychotherapy. 'I
couldn't believe it when I read your letter.'

'Yep. I just quit.'

'Going
to tell me why?' Sharon saw an alphabet of
Angst
appear on his brow, so
she jumped tracks. 'Anyway, to practical things. There's a spare room here.
Stay as long as you want.'

'How about rent?'

'Nonsense!
Put something in that fridge as a contribution. Finish your tea, and we'll go
and fetch your stuff. How did you like living near the
Me'a
She'arim
?'

'Everyone looks like Moses in a
frock-coat.'

'
Hasids
.' Sharon said the word as if it was something nasty
on the tip of her tongue. 'Don't judge the Jews by those bastards. Most
Israelis are secular and can't stand '
em
. You know
that some of those Hasidic sects don't even recognize the state of Israel? They
won't pay taxes; they won't let their sons go into the army; yet they want protection
from the Arabs, sure enough.'

'So why are they here?'

'They're
waiting for the Messiah - not your Messiah: Jesus wasn't Messiah enough - and
not until the Messiah comes will the state of Israel be declared.'

'But how will they know when the Messiah comes?’

‘They won’t. They'll argue about it, like
the last time.'

'Seriously.
If someone declares himself to be the Messiah, how would they know?'

'Signs.
There will be signs. You know my views on the lot of '
em
,
my lot, your lot, the Arabs too. This is Jerusalem. City of signs.'

I know it, thought Tom.

At the hotel, with
Sharon waiting outside in the car, Tom settled his debts. Wanting to say
goodbye to David and not finding him in the kitchen, he went to his room and
tapped softly on the door. There was no answer, but he heard a stir inside, so
he knocked again. After a few moments David appeared, swathed in an oversized
tartan dressing gown. He looked ghastly.

'Monsieur,''
he said, biting on the words, 'as you
see, I am indisposed.'

'What is it, David? You look terrible.'

'Your
ice-cream has undone me. You win. Take your spoils.' He seemed slightly
delirious.

'Can I get you something? Is there anyone
I can tell?'

'No one and
nothing. Do your worst, and please go.' With that David dragged himself through
to the adjoining room and climbed into a bed piled high with blankets. He
curled into a foetus and lay shivering.

Tom
thought of Sharon with her engine running. He found an empty wine glass, filled
it with water from the sink and placed it on the bedside table. Then he went
out, closing the door softly behind him.

He
rang the bell for the superintendent, but no one came. No one else was around.

'Shit,' he said, back in the car.

'What is it?'

'There's
an old man. I wanted to say goodbye. He's sick, and I feel bad about leaving
him.'

'It's
not your fault he's sick, is it?

 'No.
^’

'Right!' said Sharon, booting the
accelerator. 'Jerusalem by night.'

11

Tom dredged himself up
from a hangover, mouth furred with sour
Maccabee
beer. Sharon had dragged him around Jerusalem's bars, and Katie's name hadn't
been mentioned. Back at the apartment he'd spent an uncomfortable night. In
his dreams someone had been trying to speak to him, whispering in his ear
throughout the dark hours in a language which he was unable to understand but
which he thought he should know.

At
least there had been no hand knocking on the door in the dead of night.

As he sprawled naked on
the bed, his eyes rested on the tiny tattoo etched just above his ankle.
Whenever he had a hangover, Tom looked at his tattoo. Two years into marriage
and Tom, a decent mid-fielder for a Sunday League outfit, had gone to Dublin
for a week's jaunt with his football team. One night, when the Guinness had
gone down too well, he lost some kind of bet. The forfeit was to have a tattoo.

Tom
chose a point just above his ankle as the least visible place to be marked.
Befuddled as he was, to the disgust of his peanut-crunching, cheering-and-jeering
team-mates, he determined the nature of his tattoo without their help. By the
time he got back from Dublin the image had scabbed over.

'What the
hell is that?' Katie had said, throwing back the
bedsheets
on his return home.

'It's a tattoo.'

'What?'

'A tattoo.'

'Tom! It looks more like a scab.’

'That's what it is. After a while the scab
falls away, leaving a nice bright tattoo.'

'You ass-hole! You absolute ass-hole!'

'Maybe.'

'What does it say?'

'Wait and see.'

'You went to Dublin and came back with a
tattoo!'

Over the
next few days Katie couldn't help picking at the dried scab. Her long,
manicured fingernails scratched delicately at it until the dried skin and blood
flaked away.

'It's the sacred colours,' Katie breathed.

Tom
knew nothing about sacred colours. The tattoo was a red heart, glistening
against a purple-and-grey background, with a scrolled inscription of
yellow-gold. It said: KATIE. UNDYING. LOVE.

‘Katie was
simultaneously appalled and delighted. She shook her head in disbelief and
continued to do so every time she looked at it for the next ten years.

Tom got dressed. Sharon
had gone to work. He pottered around the flat for an hour before deciding to
visit David. He felt sorry for the scruffy, neglected little scholar with baggy
pants and knotted belt. An old person like David could easily rot unnoticed in
such a place. Beyond that, in this city of cities, it seemed the decent thing
to do.

'Remember
tomorrow is Friday,' Sharon had said the night before.

'What of it?'

'The Muslims
don't work on Fridays. No Arab buses, shops or taxis. The Jews don't work on
Saturdays. And your lot don't work on Sundays.

''It's
only half a city.'

'Yep.'
He found David at his station in the kitchen, rinsing cups. 'Tom! I heard you
checked out.' He seemed to have recovered his heartiness, even if he looked a
little lethargic.

'Yes. It's
what I came to tell you yesterday. Are you better?'

'Monsieur,
can you forgive me? It seems I owe you
an apology.'

Tom,
baffled, was urged to fetch
baklava
from the bakery while David made
fresh coffee. He was then ushered into David's room.

'What's this about an apology?'

'First eat!'

Tom made
himself sticky with
baklava
before David announced, quite formally, 'I thought,
Tom, that perhaps you had deliberately poisoned me with your ice-cream.'

Tom
laughed, licking his fingers. Then he saw the .blots of David's eyes magnified
behind spectacle glass. He was perfectly serious. 'You're crazy.'

'A little paranoid, but crazy, no.'

'But I don't go around poisoning people.'

'This I
understand now. But, as I said to you, I made a mistake.'

'But who would do that to you?'

'Believe me, there are people.'

'Why?'

David got up
and opened his cabinet. 'The scrolls,
monsieur.
The scrolls.' He took
out the plastic folders. 'And yet they are worth nothing.'

'You're losing me.'

David
rested the folders on the table and stood with his hands on his hips, looking
out of the window. 'In 1947 some little Bedouin boys found the first scrolls in
a number of jars in a cave near the Dead Sea. Fortunately, they thought they
might be worth something, so they took them to an antiquities dealer in
Bethlehem. Over the next few years those caves were scoured by Bedouin and
archaeologists alike. Hundreds were found in fragmentary form. Hundreds.

'Some
were biblical, like the copy of the Book of Isaiah, a thousand years older than
any previously extant copy. These established that the Old Testament was fixed
a long time before the scrolls were made and contain few variations. Some
scrolls, however, were not biblical. They contain new works; they have been
given titles such as "The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of
Darkness" and "The Manual of Discipline". There were thousands
of these fragments.

'One
such scroll, called the "Temple Scroll", was kept illegally by
whoever found it, and it came into the hands of an Arab dealer. A Professor
Yadin
spent years trying to negotiate for the return of
this scroll. Vast sums of money were demanded. Then in June 1967 the Six-day
War broke out.

'Professor
Yadin
was also a senior military adviser. On the
Wednesday of the war he heard that East Jerusalem was in Israeli hands. The
Arab dealer's shop was within that territory.
Yadin
sent in two intelligence officers, who broke into the shop and confiscated the
scroll. It was kept in a Bata shoe box, wrapped in a towel and Cellophane - can
you imagine?

'There
were also three
Karel
cigar boxes with other
fragments inside them, nothing to do with the Temple Scroll. Some coffee had
been spilled on the outside of the cigar box.'

'How do you know so much about the
details?'

When
David turned from the window, Tom already had his answer. 'I kept one of the
cigar boxes. My colleague kept another. We delivered the shoe box and the third
cigar box faithfully to
Yadin
.'

Tom
got up and went over to the folders on the table. The earth-coloured fragments
seemed to take on a more sinister quality. 'Are you saying that people would
kill you to get their hands on these?'

'They
don't want me dead because then I couldn't tell them how many fragments they
should be looking for. But somehow they have found out, and they want them. And
in case you think of me as nothing but a paranoid old man, let me tell you that
I have been visited.'

'Visited?'

'Franciscan
scholars. University professors, both Zionist and secular. Vatican
representatives. And intelligence officers of the Israeli government. All very
friendly visits. All civilized, polite inquiries, and all over the past two
years. And, in case you were wondering about my colleague with the other cigar
box, he died twelve months ago. A heart attack. Why not? He was an old man, as
I am. But before he died he gave me his fragments of the scrolls. Because he
said he was afraid.'

'But if
these things are so valuable, why on earth did you show them to me? Why
deliberately show me where you keep them? Even now I could steal the things.'

'Steal them. Go ahead. They are
forgeries.'

'Forgeries! This gets more absurd!'

I suspected you. I let
my paranoia run away with me, and I was testing you. When I fell ill I
genuinely thought you had poisoned me with ice-cream. I thought you were going
to steal these forgeries. By the way, they are very good forgeries. If you had
been after them, you would not have known. But you did not take them: your
motives were clean.'

'Are they copies of the real thing?'

'No.
They contain information on exact measurements for constructing a temple in the
time of Herod. The real things are far more interesting.'

'So
where are the real ones?'

David
deliberately made a gesture, a stage Jew. '
Monsieur!
'

'Stupid
question. But why are you making me party to all this information?'

The old man took off his
glasses and swung them in his hand. 'Because I want you to take these scrolls
out of Jerusalem.'

Tom sucked traces
of baklava
honey
from his fingers.

12

'Why me? Why should I be of any use to
you?'

'Not
everybody can be.' It was what David had said the day he'd asked Tom if he was
Jewish. 'But somebody must be. You have no vested interest. I don't care where
you take the damned things. Take them to a university in one of those grey
places in the heart of England, some quiet place where a professor of theology
will make sense of them. Only get them out of Jerusalem.'