Journal of a UFO Investigator (29 page)

“I don't know if that's true. All I know is, I like you a lot a lot
a lot
. And I didn't hurt Tom, and I will never hurt you. And I will never tell you anything I don't know to be true. This I know: that little child is a blessing, not a curse. For you and me. The whole world, in time. We need to give her a chance to live.

“We've got to go now. It's late. Dr. Talibi is waiting for us; Jameela's waiting.
She's
waiting. For all I know, her mind is already grown, it was grown from birth, and she knows everything that's happening around her.

“Don't worry about the shoe. You don't have to force it. I'll carry it for you. Walk on your good foot, and lean on me. Here. I'll help you up.”

“Swollen foot,” I said. Her strong hand reached out, took my arm, raised me from the burial stone where I'd been sitting. “Oedipus. You were smart to see that. But, Rochelle, it's only a
myth
.”

“Myths are real,” she said. “That's what I've been trying to explain. They have to be real. Otherwise they wouldn't stay around for centuries. They'd vanish like last year's top tunes.

“
That's
it, Danny. Take the steps one at a time. Keep your arm around my shoulder. Don't worry; we'll make it to Dr. Talibi's. He's only a few blocks away.

“Hold on to me, and walk on your good foot.

“
That's
it.”

THE MOON BLOSSOMED, SWELLED. THEN IT DWINDLED ONCE
more. When it became a pale sliver in the east, it was time for me to go.

Rochelle and I stood outside the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, on Mount Zion, and watched the sun set across the Valley of Hinnom.

“There's where you'll take her across,” Rochelle whispered. “Down into the valley, then up the other side to that ridge, where you see those houses. Keep to the right, though. The border runs between the houses. If you cut too far to the left, you'll still be in Jordan.”

Damn that Talibi
, I thought. I held the binoculars to my eyes. I focused on the tightly built cluster of limestone houses on the ridge opposite us, the place called Abu Tor. The houses all looked the same, though Rochelle had explained some of them were on the Israeli side, some on the Jordanian. The border was all but invisible. I barely made out a barbed wire fence cutting across a street, separating its two ends.

“And we can't just go to the Jordanian part of Abu Tor?” I said. “And sneak over to the Israeli side from there?”

“Too dangerous. Too many guards. Better to go across the valley.”

The valley wasn't exactly safe either. Rochelle had warned me about the land mines planted there in 1948, during Israel's War of Independence, and never removed. I turned the binoculars into the dark shadows of the valley, looking for some trace of those mines. But of course you can't see a land mine when you look at the surface of the ground. That's the whole point.

 

“
Hadassah
,” Dr. Saeed Talibi had said three weeks earlier, when he was done examining my baby. He spoke the word softly yet emphatically, with a strange Arabic enunciation, ending the second syllable with a prolonged hiss. In his white coat he hurried to his desk, began to write. Rochelle and I sat across from him, our hands touching. “
Hadassah
,” he said again.

“What do you mean, ‘
Hadassah
'?” I said.

I might as well not have spoken. A steady, cherubic smile lit his plump face; he covered sheet after sheet of office stationery with long paragraphs of English, which I soon gave up trying to read upside down. When he was done, he folded the papers and sealed them in an unmarked envelope. He handed it to Rochelle.

While Jameela, the peasant woman from the Galilee with her large gold-capped teeth and black embroidered dress, sat in a chair by the opposite wall. She smiled and crooned to the infant in her lap, a baby with a catlike face and huge black, slanted eyes. And tiny lungs, which struggled noisily to suck oxygen from our ungiving air.

 

The sun's edge touched the horizon. The church's bright mosaics glowed in its last rays. Rochelle and I spoke in whispers, though there wasn't anyone near. The acoustics of the place were strange. Every now and then we'd hear, coming out of empty air, a fragment of conversation or the drone of a tourist guide: “—this church, built in 1931 over the place where Peter denied Our Lord, the night he was brought before the authorities—” Then the voice faded away and we looked around, and sometimes we could spot the person who'd been talking. Sometimes we couldn't.

“I wish we could just cross at the Mandelbaum Gate,” I said. “Like everybody else.”

“I wish you could, too,” she said, stroking my arm. “But you can't. You're not like everyone else. Other people have papers, at least a passport. You don't.”

“And we don't want anybody looking at her too closely, I suppose.”

“No, we don't. Try to bring her through the gate, and somebody's bound to realize she's not from this earth. If not the Jordanians, then the Israelis. And then the interrogations will start. Believe me, it'll be bad. The whole purpose will be defeated.”

A priest, stocky, bearded, brown-robed, had led a group of tourists to a spot about twenty feet away. Some of them fingered rosaries and crucifixes as he read to them from the New Testament: “ ‘And immediately, while Peter yet spake, the cock crew. And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out and wept bitterly.' ”

“Do you really think they can save her?” I said, once the group had left.

“I'm not sure. If she's got a chance anywhere, it's at the Hadassah Hospital on the other side. That's the best medical facility in the area. Maybe in the world. All the doctors here know that, and their patients do too, although of course they don't say it too loud.”

She put her arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. “I wish I were going with you,” she said.

“Remind me again why you can't.”

“If the Israelis catch you crossing, the worst is they'll hold you a couple of weeks till they get confirmation you really are Danny Shapiro, a nice Jewish boy from Pennsylvania who wouldn't do them any harm. They catch me, next thing I'm back in the States. Standing trial for murder.”

I pressed my face into her hair. It smelled clean, of unscented soap. I'd never smelled anything finer in my life.

“So once I go,” I said, “I'll never see you again.”

“I wouldn't say that,” she said. “Not at all. There's an even chance she may live. Better than even, Dr. Talibi says, if she makes it into the right hands. And if she lives, in a few years this world is going to be so different from anything we've known, we're not going to recognize it. So different we'll think we're living on another planet. Then I'll be able to come home. And you and I will be together again.”

The voice came out of the air: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Then it trailed away, and I could not hear any more.

It's the priest
, I thought.
The same priest who was here with the people a minute ago.

 

The Valley of Hinnom began to darken. I looked toward the rocky, brambly slopes after which hell had been named. Once upon a time the people of Jerusalem had used this valley to burn their garbage, sometimes also their children, as sacrifices to pagan gods or maybe their own God. The stink of the place, the low growling flames, and the screams of children burned alive had made
gei hinnom
, “the Valley of Hinnom,” into Gehenna, the Jewish word for hell. I winced and turned the binoculars upon the limestone houses of Abu Tor.

The barbed wire fence and the street the fence cut in two came into my view. Also a teenaged boy, walking down the street from the Israeli side toward the fence.

I kept my binoculars focused on that boy. I noticed, as he walked, how his clothes hung on his body as though they weren't quite right for him: suntan pants and a short-sleeved yellow shirt that seemed a little too large, a little too loose. He wore thick black horn-rimmed glasses.

I knew that boy.

I knew why his face sagged under the weight of sadness, of helpless worry, of exhaustion too deep to be slept away. I knew why he stepped so awkwardly, as though his body were a bicycle he hadn't quite learned to ride.

—I can't stand him, I hate him, I despise him; with those thick glasses he's the ugliest creature in the world—

He stopped at the fence. He stared at it, as if only now starting to grasp that this is the end of his world, that the border cuts through Abu Tor like a crevasse in the earth and there's nowhere more for him to go. He read about this in his guidebook. But it doesn't sink in until you actually stand there.

He opened his guidebook, to make sure this really was Abu Tor, that he hadn't made some mistake. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and began writing, writing, while behind him two brown-skinned Israeli boys about his age, who a few minutes ago offered to buy the cheap box camera dangling from a cord around his neck, nudged each other and pointed toward him, and laughed.

The boy looked up, straight at me.

I lowered my binoculars. I looked away.

SHE TOOK ME TO DINNER AT A RESTAURANT ON SALAH ED-DIN
Street. The upper chamber was carpeted; cushions were spread around the low tables; we had until midnight. We sat on the cushions in the candlelight.

I leaned against the wall as I ate. Rochelle leaned against me. We ate hummus with pita, and olives, and roast chicken served on pita. We drank bottled water and later tea. They served wine in that restaurant, but neither of us wanted any.

“You
must
give my best to Julian when you see him,” she said. “I don't know when that'll be, or where you'll be. But whenever it happens, tell him his old pal Rachel says hello.”

How will he know that's you?
I wanted to ask. But she'd dipped a bit of pita into the hummus and touched it to my lips. I opened my mouth, and she fed it to me.

“If he's still alive,” I said when I finished swallowing.

“Oh, he's alive. I don't know where he is, but he's alive. Julian's not so easy to kill. They've tried, more than once.”

 

They brought dessert.

“She's going to live,” Rochelle said.

“I hope so,” I said. The dessert was sweet and heavy, something made with honey. I didn't know what it was called. I didn't expect ever to taste it again.

“She'll live,” Rochelle said. “And then she'll grow. And when she's grown, she'll do what she was sent here for. Then you and I will be together again. And you know what we're going to do then?”

“What?” I said.

“We'll go to the old farmhouse, up to the second floor, and we'll make love. Real love. On the floor, that thin old carpet. The way I wanted to, the night I met you.”

 

Outside, Jameela met us. She put my baby into my arms. Each time I held her I was astonished how light she was. She weighed less than the blankets wrapped around her.