By the Rivers of Babylon (45 page)

As he watched, the picture suddenly dimmed and he knew the batteries had finally given out. He took one last look before the picture became darker and pulled back on the trigger.

On the hill, everyone knew that the time had come.

Dobkin pushed Chislon forcibly back into the
gufa
, then shoved the craft away from the shore. There was considerably more freeboard now, and Chislon was far better off taking his chances with the Euphrates than sharing Dobkin’s fate. Also, Chislon was the only connection between Dobkin and the village of Ummah, and Dobkin did not want that connection known by Rish should they be caught. He watched the
gufa
float downriver toward Hillah until he lost sight of it. He turned inland.

Dobkin was totally disoriented and could not be sure exactly where he was in relation to the Ishtar Gate. He walked through the blinding dust storm, keeping count of his paces. There were unmarked excavations everywhere and he almost fell into a few of them. At least their presence confirmed that he was indeed in Babylon. He navigated across that peculiar blanched, nitrous soil which had been produced from the walls of ancient buildings and which stunted and destroyed vegetation, making the site of Babylon an awful and naked waste.

When he had traveled three hundred meters, he climbed onto a high piece of ground and peered out at the surrounding terrain. He assumed that the guest house would have lights and looked for them through the darkness, but saw nothing.

He heard a noise behind him and spun around. Something moved in the dark. He saw it move again and saw its slanted yellow eyes glowing through the darkness.

The jackal stood on a crumbled wall, its hindquarters to the wind and its face pointing at Dobkin. Its eyes were half-closed and it stood stoically, accepting its miserable lot. Dobkin suddenly felt an empathy with this predator. “I don’t know what you’re looking for here, old hunter, but I hope you find it—as long as it isn’t me.”

The jackal moved gracefully along the wall toward Dobkin, sized him up, and stopped. He raised his muzzle and howled. There was no answer from his pack, and the jackal leaped from the wall and disappeared into the night.

Dobkin also came down from the high place and took tempory shelter in a partly excavated house. There were owls in the dark corners and they hooted at his presence. Dobkin settled onto the floor and fought down the numbing pain and fatigue. He let his eyes close, and his mind drifted.

Babylon. What an incredibly dead place. And the dead city was trying to kill him and add his bones to its bleached earth. “And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant.” Jeremiah’s prophecy had been as accurate as Isaiah’s.

In the fourth century, recalled Dobkin, a Persian king had turned the city into a royal game reserve. Its incredible walls, sometimes listed in place of the Hanging Gardens as the Second Wonder of the World, still stood in those days, though most of the 360 watchtowers along its ramparts had fallen. This bizarre fate, the transformation of the largest city in the world into a place for wild animals—a zoo, really—recalled even more dramatically to Dobkin the prophesies of Isaiah and Jeremiah. A dwelling place for wild beasts.

By the beginning of the fifth century the Euphrates had changed course and Babylon had become a vast marsh, and the final prophesies of Isaiah and Jeremiah were fulfilled when, as Jeremiah wrote eight hundred years before the fact, “The sea is come up upon Babylon: she is covered with the multitude of the waves thereof.”

Dobkin felt himself slipping off and lurched to his feet. He took some water from the goatskin and cleared his eyes. It was a strange world that he had been catapulted into, and he suspected that there was some meaning in all of it, but he could not begin to fathom what it was.

He climbed out of the half-buried house and onto a trail that ran over the sunken ruins. He turned north and picked his way along the flood bank of the Euphrates. He walked on for nearly a kilometer, his body hunched over against the wind and his face wrapped in his
kheffiyah.

The wind dropped briefly, and he thought be heard a noise and lifted his head. An Arab stared at him from the alcove of a doorway. Dobkin realized that he was in Kweirish. He stared back at the Arab, then approached him. “The guest house,” he said in what he hoped was Palestinian-accented Arabic.

The man believed that he was speaking to an Ashbal who had lost his way in the darkness. He had little love for these Palestinians, but they seemed to be the local authority at the moment. He had never seen an Ashbal without a rifle and he wondered about that. He stepped out of the alcove and walked past Dobkin, looking closely at him as he brushed by.

As Dobkin followed, he reached into his belt and took out the knife that the Jews of Ummah had given him. They walked up a crooked street for a few minutes, then the man disappeared into an alley between two buildings.

Dobkin followed carefully. He looked down the alley, but the Arab had disappeared. Dobkin put his back to the wall on his right and sidestepped in, the knife at his side ready to move.

The Arab suddenly stepped out of a niche in the wall opposite him and held out his arm. “This is the way.”

Dobkin was certain this was the goat path down which Hamadi had taken him and Hausner and which led to the Ishtar Gate. He nodded and made an appropriate expression of gratitude, adding a mild benediction. He realized he would have to pass very close to the man to get by. He tightened his grip on his knife and walked, his right shoulder slightly out front, until he was abreast of the Arab.

The Arab gripped his own dagger. He meant to murder the Ashbal for his clothes and boots and whatever else he happened to have in his pockets. The Ashbals would never trace the man back to Kweirish.

Dobkin passed within a meter of the man and fixed his eyes on him.

The Arab realized how big the Ashbal was and saw also that he was alert. In fact, he wondered if the man had plans to murder
him.
His eyes glanced downward and he saw the big man’s knife. Should he strike first or should he stand back and pray to Allah that the big man had no murderous designs on him? Certainly the man would not murder him for his poor
gellebiah
and his old sandals? “Allah go with you,” he said and bowed his head, leaving himself at the big man’s mercy.

Dobkin hesitated. All the reasons for murdering the man and not murdering him flashed through his mind. “And with you,” Dobkin answered. He slid by and disappeared up the goat path between the houses.

Again, as before, a feeling of déjà vu came over him as he walked up into the city. He knew it was only a combination of fatigue and stress coupled with all those old maps and conjectural restorations he had seen of the place, but nevertheless it was haunting. He supposed that like most Jews—if the stories of the Captivity were substantially correct—he had had ancestors living in this place. But his ancestors had not tarried when Cyrus said “Go.” They went, only to be dispersed again by the Romans some centuries later. From then until 1948 there had been no place to call home. Somehow the family known as Dobkin, after two millennia of wandering, had come to live in Russia, and from Russia they completed their journey and returned to Palestine. And from Palestine—Israel—Benjamin Dobkin had come back to Babylon. It remained to be seen if he would return to Jerusalem.

Dobkin found the ancient bed of the Euphrates, and from there it was easy to follow the old river wall into the palace area. Within a quarter of an hour, he found himself staring up at the glazed lions on the towers of the Ishtar Gate. He passed through the gate and followed the Sacred Processional Way until he saw the lights of the guest house. There appeared to be no sentry. Across from the guest house was a bivouac of struck tents. Some distance off he could make out the small museum. The Ashbals appeared to be gone. Gone to attack the hill again. As he stood and caught his breath, he heard a long burst of AK-47 fire coming from the direction of the hill, then silence. He wondered who had fired the burst. An outpost, he imagined. Another martyr to add to the very long list.

He thought for a moment of trying to find Dr. Al-Thanni in the museum, but decided against that. Time was crucial now. Besides could he trust Al-Thanni? And if he could, did he want to involve him in this? He realized that he had no specific plans beyond making a very important telephone call, and in fact he did not want to think too long about making any plans. The whole incredible operation could only work because of boldness, daring, and luck. So far he had been very lucky. He had found the village of Ummah and had acquired a set of tiger fatigues. He had found the guest house, and the Ashbals seemed to be gone from the tents. Now all he had to do was go inside and kill the duty man and anyone else left behind. But the wounded would probably be in there, and that meant orderlies, too. Perhaps a lot of them.

He walked up to the front veranda and opened the door into the small lobby. He blinked his eyes to adjust them to the light. A young Arab in tiger fatigues sat behind the clerk’s counter reading a newspaper. It was all so commonplace, thought Dobkin. The young man looked up, and Dobkin could see his features straining as he tried to place him.

“Yes?” The man, Kassim, had just decided to rape the Jewess again—if she wasn’t dead yet. Now this interruption. “Yes?” There was something wrong—those ill-fitting fatigues. They were wet and the dust was plastered on them with dark blotches that looked like blood. No rifle—a goatskin—the
kheffiyah
didn’t sit quite right. Kassim stood up.

Dobkin walked to the counter quickly, but not too quickly, reached over and grabbed the young man by the hair with his left hand as his right hand thrust his knife into the man’s larynx. He twisted the knife, then let the man slide down gently to the floor. He wiped his hand on the newspaper, then blotted the counter with it and dropped the paper behind it. He could still hear a bubbling sound from the other side of the counter. He turned and walked to the door marked in Arabic “Manager’s Office,” and opened it.

The small office was lit by a single floor lamp, and in the pool of light on the floor lay a naked women—or a girl—on her stomach, covered with blood and apparently dead or close to it. Dobkin knew by the skin and haircut that it was no local peasant girl who had been abducted for the obvious reason. He walked quickly over to the body and turned it over. She looked familiar even though her face was battered. His worst fear—that she was one of his—was realized as he slowly recognized Yigael
Tekoah’s secretary, but he could not remember her name. He knelt down and put his ear to her heart. She was alive. He looked at her bloody body. It appeared as if they had let some kind of wild animal attack her.

He picked her up and laid her on a small ottoman against the wall. A long woolen
gellebiah
hung on a coat hook on the door and he took it down and slipped it over her. He found a pitcher of water standing next to a basin of bloody water on a sideboard. He poured the water from the pitcher over the girl’s face. She stirred slightly. Dobkin put the pitcher down. He could not spare one more second for the suffering girl. He walked to the desk and picked up the telephone. The single, commonplace act felt strange, the way it had during the Sinai Campaign when he had once found a working telephone in a destroyed village. He had called the next village—still in Egyptian hands—and announced his imminent arrival. That had been a lark. This was not. He waited impatiently for a dial tone. Overhead, he could hear the sound of footsteps and groaning. Orderlies and wounded. On the other side of the wall he heard men speaking. Outside, the wind shook the louvers and rattled the window panes. Dobkin wondered if the line was dead. He looked down at the telephone. There was no dial face. It was completely operator-controlled, but how did one raise the operator? He tapped on the cradle for what seemed like a very long time.

Suddenly, a man’s voice came on, annoyed and churlish. “Yes? Hillah exchange! Yes?”

Dobkin took a breath. “Hillah, get me the international operator in Baghdad, please.”

“Baghdad?”

“Baghdad.” Dobkin knew that he would have to route this call with all the care and patience of a man building a house of cards. One slip and the connection could be broken.

“Who is calling Baghdad?”

Dobkin never fully appreciated his own country until he traveled to controlled societies. He hesitated, then spoke. “This is Dr. Al-Thanni.” No. The Hillah operator would certainly know that voice. A bad mistake. “That is, I am Dr. Omar Sabbah, a
house guest
of Dr. Al-Thanni of the museum, Baghdad please.”

There was a pause. “Wait.”

Dobkin wondered if Al-Thanni was in his quarters in the guest house, or if he was staying at the museum. Or was he home
in Baghdad? He held the receiver to his ear and waited. A clock on the wall ticked away the minutes. He found himself staring into the bowl of bloody water and turned away. His eyes burned and his whole body felt as though it wanted to fall. He carried the telephone across the room and knelt beside Deborah Gideon. He wet her lips from his goatskin and let some water slide between them. He felt her pulse and her pale skin and forced back her eyelid. She was in shock, but she was young and healthy looking enough to come out of it. He touched some of her wounds and looked at them closely. He did not feel so bad about killing the duty man now.

He ministered to her as best he could while he waited, the receiver cradled between his shoulder and ear. The clock ticked off a quarter of an hour. The voices on the other side of the wall got louder. A card game. Overhead there was a thump on the floor. A patient fell out of bed—or died and was thrown onto a stretcher.

Someone walked into the lobby and shouted. “Kassim! Kassim! Where are you?”

That was probably the dead man’s name, thought Dobkin. Would anyone think to lean over the counter and look on the floor?