The Tenth Song (39 page)

“Go to sleep.”

“Well.” She yawned, stretching out gratefully, her head resting on her lumpy backpack.

Daniel took his jacket out of his backpack, folding it and placing it gently under her head.

“Daniel!”

“Hmm?”

“Daniel,” she repeated softly, her eyes closing.

He stayed up, watching Abigail uneasily.

“Rav Natan says it’s time,” Ben Tzion announced.

Kayla felt an electric thrill course through her body. She squeezed Daniel’s hand as he helped her up.

He looked worried.

“I don’t like the way your mother’s holding her stomach.”

Kayla took another look. “I hadn’t noticed. What do you think is wrong?”

“I don’t know for sure. Even if it’s only a precaution, she needs a real medical workup. Soon.”

Kayla nodded. “I’ll make sure of it.”

They began the slow upward climb of the last leg of their journey. It was their steepest climb yet. Someone had hung ropes for rappelling. They held on tightly, their hands blistered as they pulled themselves up, their knees scraping against the jutting granite and sandstone. Progress was slow and painful as they navigated the tiny stones and big rocks that blocked their path, holding on to the thorny charmless shrubs clinging tenaciously to life through the crevices. Daniel and Kayla helped pull Abigail up, each grabbing one of her hands.

Seth, an experienced climber, was up there waiting for them.

“Well, there it is.” Seth gestured toward the opening in the side of the mountain.

The cave entrance was several meters tall and round, as if the mountain had opened its mouth in an expression of wonder. Rav Natan and Professor Milstein stood next to the entrance.

“Talmidim, friends, please come up and come inside. There is room for all of you,” Rav Natan said. A young boy with platinum blond hair was clinging to his leg. The Rav laughed, reaching down to lift his small son up in his arms. The child wrapped his hands around his father’s neck.

Abraham and Isaac, Abigail thought, looking at the two of them. Somehow, it made the whole scene less intense. Natan was just a man, after all—not a prophet; a young man with a small child in his life, and a wife too, no doubt, one of those slim, tall women swathed in a colorful Indian skirt and cotton turban. Whatever would happen would be part of the real world of children and families, despite the exotic locale.

Kayla climbed the last few steps toward the cave entrance, then hesitated, shuddering. It was so dark inside in contrast to the brightness of the day. She crossed the threshold hesitantly. It was huge, she realized, startled. Outside, there had been no hint. However many people entered, they were immediately swallowed up. The air was cool and dry, a bit rancid with dust.

“Find a place to sit!” Rav Natan called out.

Kayla was shocked. The emotional pitch of his voice was startling and unfamiliar. She had never heard her teacher sound like that. His voice seemed to bounce off the walls, the echo intensifying and doubling their impact. She walked farther into the cave. People were pointing and gasping. There, on the back wall, were four stone monoliths engraved with Hebrew lettering.

They crowded around the tablets, fingering the indentations, all speaking at once in amazement. The cave began to fill with an intensity of sound that Abigail found frightening, the noise discordant and unrecognizable as human language, all the words nullified as they overrode each other.

She held her ears, feeling her body begin to sweat. She had to get out of here, she thought, feeling faint.

“Please, silence,” Rav Natan ordered. And as quickly as the noise had started, it suddenly stopped. The silence, too, was intense.

“Everyone, sit down. The professor is an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is going to read these words to you, translating them into modern Hebrew. Afterward, we will discuss their meaning. But we need silence; otherwise, the echo will destroy whatever we say.”

There was a scraping of feet as people found places on the floor. A child cried. Rav Natan’s small son pulled insistently on his leg and was again lifted into his arms.

“A time is coming…
” the professor began, tracing the letters with his finger,

when children of light will have lost their way.

Man, woman, and child will honor the dishonorable

Laud and seek the indecent

Praise corruption.

Hands will be raised in solidarity with purest evil.

The day is coming when God will look at His world and ask: What have you done?

Then will come the time of reckoning:

The sky will darken, and the sun will be hidden as the earth turns cold. A cataclysm will strike the North and South beyond human imaginings. East and West will be devastated. The earth will disintegrate like a caterpillar, all its vanities, ugliness, beauty, truth, lies destroyed. It will lie dormant until the movement of rebirth begins. And then, as the earth reaches its purification, the time of resurrection will start.

The graves will open, the blameless dead will rise, all their wounds healed.

Time itself will be reborn: Every moment that did not show God’s glory will be resurrected to live again. All moments of cruelty or ugliness or injustice will be reborn and relived in kindness, beauty, and justice.

Every unworthy conversation, every unworthy deed, every unworthy gesture or thought will be reborn again in worthiness.

Then the earth will sing, as it fills with the knowledge of God, leaving no room for doubt, for wrong or evil choices.

And then no man or woman will wish their will to be separate from God’s will.

And death and evil will be banished forever, and tears shall be wiped from all faces.

The words, repeated and intensified by the echo, were like thunder, making their bodies shake. Like a powerful drug, the ideas coursed through their minds, a river that had broken its banks and refused to stay in its bed, gathering everything before it in a wild rush.

Seth got up abruptly, feeling his way through the crowd, his hands clutching the walls to steady himself.

He sat outside in the light, his heart pounding, his mouth dry. He felt almost as if he’d been hypnotized. He took deep breaths, trying to clear his mind.

He felt frightened. Words written thousands of years ago by ignorant people, who thought the world was flat…

Yet…

Maybe I am just tired, he told himself again. The long flight, the harrowing car ride, the shock of seeing Kayla with another man. And then this long desert trek. The heat! He was not himself, his mind repeated calmingly. In a few days, in his dorm, he would tell his roommate all about this. They would laugh.

But he couldn’t budge his fear. He thought of what Kayla had said to him earlier:
What do human beings understand about anything? Can you understand what it means that you didn’t exist, then you were born? Where do we all come from? And what does death mean?

There were things he had not thought about for years. Even as a child, looking at the stars, when he had tried to imagine God, infinity—the larger it grew
in his mind, the more frightened he’d become. How can a person imagine something endless, or something that always existed? It was impossible. He had never allowed himself to think about it again.

But that didn’t mean it didn’t exist or it wasn’t the truth.

I am a coward, he realized. Afraid to face the big questions, the true meaning of my own existence, and thus the meaning of my life and all my actions.

He didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be forced into it. He looked around him desperately for some way to escape. But all he could see in every direction was desolation and death. Only here, inside this cave, on this mountaintop, was life immediately possible. There was no place to run to. No place, he finally admitted to himself, he wanted to run to.

Slowly, he turned around and walked back into the cave.

Rav Natan had taken the professor’s place. He was speaking.

“The people who wrote this prophecy lived two thousand years ago. And yet, their vision of the world is not very different from our own. Everywhere they looked, they saw evil. And what was their solution? They left their communities, cut their ties to their families, and went to live in the desert, hoping that while others succumbed and were destroyed by evil, they would survive. They did not succeed. History tells us that it was these desert communes whom the apocalypse found first, whether in the form of Roman soldiers or an earthquake. They died out; nothing is left but their scrolls and stone tablets, their olive and date pits.

“It is we, the descendants of those who stayed behind to struggle with the world as part of it, who have survived to read their words. Our community in the desert is not a final destination. It is a place to become the best you can be, so you can return and transform your little corner of the world for the good, to make the world a better place one good deed at a time.

“Men despair at how little they can do.
Do that little thing, the tiny thing you know you can do!
Each of us has a true and authentic song as old as the earth, but when it rises from our souls and is lent our voice, it becomes new again, and is renewed as we grow spiritually from day to day. When all seems lost, sing that song, the Tenth Song, to save yourself and the world.”

Kayla reached up, touching Daniel’s cheek. It was wet with tears. She wiped them away with her thumb. He kissed her fingers.

They staggered from the cave, exhausted, yet feeling that a nugget of gold
had been thrown into their laps, a private treasure to be cherished that would enrich them forever.

“What now?” Seth asked without his usual arrogance. He too looked pale, subdued.

Abigail took two steps toward them when the pains in her stomach suddenly turned lethal. She doubled up, clutching her body.

“Oh God!” she moaned.

“Mom?”

“Lay her down here,” Daniel demanded. He felt her head. She was burning up. “Abigail, Abigail, where does it hurt you exactly?”

She moaned. “I can’t stand the pain.”

He gently probed her abdomen. “Does it hurt here?”

“Oh God,” she screamed.

“I think it’s her appendix.” He took out a strange-looking phone from his bag. “It’s a satellite phone, for places that have no cell-phone reception.”

“Who are you calling?” Seth demanded.

“I’m calling the army base nearby. They’ll need to send a helicopter immediately to evacuate her.”

“Is that really necessary? Maybe she’s just dehydrated?”

“Seth, shut up!” Kayla shouted at him. “Mom, Mom!”

Abigail heard her daughter’s voice as if it were coming faintly through a bad long-distance phone connection. “I’m dying,” she whispered.

“What? What did you say?” Kayla repeated, filled with a sudden panic.

It couldn’t end now! Just as they were on the same path to discovery. It was too soon, they were both too young! I will never get to know you, Kayla thought, horrified.

They waited twenty minutes. It felt like two days. Finally, they heard the sound of helicopter blades whipping against the wind, creating a sudden sandstorm as it hovered, then landed.

Abigail cried out in pain as they lifted her body onto a stretcher, every jostle and footstep agony.

“There is only room enough for two of you besides the patient in the helicopter. Who’s coming?” an army medic shouted.

“I’m her daughter!” Kayla shouted back above the din, jumping into the helicopter. She looked at Seth and Daniel, reaching out impulsively. “Daniel, get in!”

“No, Kayla.” Daniel shook his head. “You and Seth have unfinished business.”

She looked at him, stunned.

Seth took two steps toward the helicopter. Then he put his hands behind Daniel’s shoulders, pushing him forward. “She needs
you.
Not me,” Seth said. “And I think whatever business we once had together is over. Right, Kayla?”

“Thank you, Seth. Thank you so much! For everything. Forgive me.” She reached out to him, and he moved toward her, letting himself be hugged and hugging her back. Then he caught Daniel’s arm, helping him into the helicopter. “Take good care of her,” he said hoarsely.

The doors slid shut, and the helicopter lifted.

Kayla looked out of the window. She saw Seth move away, covering his eyes from the swirling sand and dust that darkened his bright gold hair. Then she saw him look up, lifting his hand in a final farewell. She raised her hand and waved back, watching his figure shrink and fade into the distance as they flew over the mountains, her eyes blurring with tears.

She felt Daniel’s arms around her.

“Is my mom going to be all right?”

“We’ll be in the hospital in minutes,” he assured her, not answering her question.

“Daniel…”

“Yes?”

“I think I’ve found that one good thing inside me I’ve been looking for.”

“What is it, my love?”

“It’s how I feel about you.” She put her arms around him and wept.

Ten minutes later, they landed.

Am I going to die? Abigail wondered calmly as she was wheeled down the hospital corridors. Somehow, it was not the awful thought she had always imagined
it would be. She felt at peace as the pains lessened with the drip from the intravenous tubes. Perhaps they had put in some kind of painkiller. Or perhaps you didn’t feel pain when you were about to die.

She was given a CT scan, confirming Daniel’s diagnosis.

“It’s her appendix. But there are all kinds of hazy lines around it. It may have burst, or be infected. In any case, it has to come out immediately.”

“Mom, they are going to operate. It’s your appendix. You are going to be all right, Mom!”