Hadassah Covenant, The (11 page)

“Just tell me one thing,” I pleaded. “You are speaking of one woman in particular? There is one you long for?”

He inhaled deeply and stared up at the sky, and from that, knowing Mordecai, I knew the truth.

“She sees me as the King’s advisor,” he murmured. “A father image more than anything else. She esteems me, but not . . .” His voice trailed off. “And besides. She is absolutely unapproachable.”

“Poppa, I am a woman, and I can tell you that nothing is as simple as that. Perhaps she only pictures you that way because she sees the resignation on your face. Or maybe G-d has yet to open her eyes. Maybe she has more of life’s road to travel before she is ready for you.”

He waved his hand. “It is not important, Hadassah. Please. These are trivial matters compared to the work G-d has given me.”

“No!” I said, almost shouting again. “That is where I disagree with you the most. You may be a godly man, but you do not know
how He intends to accomplish His purposes in this world. How do you know that we only serve G-d through positions of power and influence?”

He sighed, looked at me, and chuckled. “Hadassah, as usual, you leave me without words.”

“You don’t need words with me. But let me end with this. You know this is the whole reason I am leaving for the Promised Land. I feel YHWH calling me there, even though I have no idea how I can possibly be of help. But I’m willing to trust what He put in my heart. And if He put love for a woman in yours, then you must explore that with Him.”

And, my dear Leah, you must explore that question with Him, too. To complete my reply to you, I now ask you to embark with me on yet another journey back into my life—this time into events and emotions more recent than our last correspondence.

The good news? I do, in fact, have an answer for you. And it is an encouraging answer. A heart-lifting, joyful affirmation. You will be glad to hear what I have to say.

The bad news? As your question is deeply felt, my reply might seem lengthy. But to have a peaceful answer to your question, I must tell you of some events that I mercifully withheld from you. They comprise some of the darkest and most agonizing low points of my life.

I have been where you are. And I know that if . . .

Chapter Ten

T
HE
P
RIME
M
INISTER’S LIMOUSINE—DOWNTOWN
J
ERUSALEM—MINUTES AFTER
H
ADASSAH MADE HER CALL

I
n the gloom of
the Residence garage beyond her limousine window, Hadassah’s two escorts from Shin Beth, Israel’s domestic counterintelligence and protective service, struggled to ready their motorcycles. Like her, they had not ventured beyond the walls of the Residence in weeks, and lacking the proper lead time, her right “wingman,” as she had always mischievously called him, could not electrically start his motor. She could see him glance back at her with irritation as he rose and fell in his seat, futilely trying to stomp down on his starter pedal.

Clearly, both he and his partner were agitated by the abruptness of her departure, her apparent flaunting of observed procedure. She knew that in these days following the attempt on her husband’s life, security measures would be at their strongest. she could remember, from her briefings upon entering the Prime Minister’s Residence, that even scheduled outings could provoke a flurry of covert communications among a small army of sentries, reconnaissance assets, and even undercover operatives.

Yet today the whole apparatus would have to wait. If she had to, she would walk to Jacob’s office. She felt the certainty of this meeting
like a tiny pebble gathering mass and hardness deep inside her heart, and she clung to its solidity as if her life depended on it.

To calm herself she leaned back into the leather headrest and savored the feeling of once more being dressed, out of her bedroom, and sitting upright.

She had not even sat in a vehicle seat since returning from her father’s
Yiskor
service, which she had attended with husband on one side, doctor on the other, each taking anxious glimpses of her face as she stared ahead without acknowledging either. Only three days after surgery to remove the shrapnel inside her, her pain extended beyond inner shock and grief.

At least all the media hype had resulted in one bittersweet byproduct. The circumstances of his death had made her father’s memorial a state event. Broadcast over live television, attended by thousands. She pictured the sea of anguished faces stretched before her in Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, reserved mainly for state events—“
The Great Synagogue
!” he would have exclaimed, eyes wide, his voice making that hoarse rasp it used to convey amazement—“
For me
?”

The thought was definitely a source of comfort, for Poppa had been a simple, modest man, completely unknown beyond family and friends until his little girl had married the head of state. He would have been shocked and overwhelmed to know he was mourned by an entire nation.
His
entire nation.
If only he could have seen it
, she thought with her first hint of a smile.
If only . . .

With the deaths of her elderly aunts in the last few years, she had become sadly familiar with the Yizkor, the “Memorial Prayers” service. Yet she had not been prepared for the sight of Israel’s whole cabinet and assembled Knesset leadership sitting behind her in a show of solidarity, wearing stricken expressions.

Nor had she been ready for the words of the Yizkor Father’s Version, read with sonorous dignity by Israel’s Chief Rabbi: “May the Lord remember the soul of my father, my teacher, David Kesselman, who has gone on to his eternal rest. . . . ” And when the cantor, the most famous in the Jewish world, had begun to sing the classic lament
E-l Malei Rachamim
—“G-d, Full of Mercy”—his plaintive voice filling the synagogue’s vaulted heights with aching notes of loss, she had lost her composure and wept openly.

And she hadn’t been weeping only for her father. Every one of her relatives who had attended her wedding only five years before were now gone. Aunt Rose, who had surprised her by flying in early from America for her wedding, had been the first.
Stroke
. Grandma Grossman had died in her sleep, peacefully, from an aneurysm. Aunt Connie had died just four months ago of pneumonia in a Tel Aviv hospital.

Now, with the loss of her father, an entire generation that had once nurtured and upheld her had vanished within just a few short years. They had survived the Holocaust, but they could not survive time.

Now, without brother or sister, she found herself utterly alone. With both hands, she had clutched her husband’s arm, for he was now all she had left.

With a feeling of nostalgia so keen that it twisted cruelly in her still-healing abdomen, Hadassah tried to picture the world her relatives had known. The tumult they had outlived. The thought of it only plunged her into a swirl of pride, grief, and resentment. But she willed herself to continue, to remember and reminisce. As painful as it was, comfort accompanied the memories.

She tried to picture her father growing up in the rural Hungary of the early twentieth century—a place of occasional persecution for Jews, yet idyllic nevertheless. How he and five other relatives had survived the Holocaust by tracing a harrowing walk to the port of Trieste, where they had bribed their way aboard a ship to London and to distant, previously emigrated relatives. How a sister, two uncles and their families who had declined to make the trip perished in Nazi death camps. She strained to remember the stories he had told her about being a cold and terrified teenager, trekking through forests at night, avoiding German patrols and the shotguns of suspicious locals.

A growl from the long-delayed motorcycle start jerked her back to the present. The garage door tilted upward, greeting her eyes with the slate gray of a rainy midday, and the limousine was off at last. She moved her eyes away from the Residence driveway, the gates sliding open, traffic on Balfour Street braking suddenly to make way for the motorcade. But she could not shift her thoughts.

What a blessing this place, the reborn State of Israel, must have been to her beleaguered relatives, those first few years after war’s end! It was more than the rebirth of their homeland—it was an actual open
invitation to a place they had only heard spoken of in hushed, emotional tones over Seder and Passover.

Still a bit light-headed from her prolonged bed rest, she yawned, refocused her gaze on the pedestrians lining the elegant sidewalks of Rehavia, Jerusalem’s most gracious residential neighborhood, and squinted to banish the ache inside her. But the sight of curious onlookers only reminded her of the crowds that had lined this same street on the morning of Poppa’s funeral. She could not forget the gratitude that had accompanied her first glimpse of eerie candle glow flickering up into all those tearstained, sympathetic faces. For hours they had stood that night outside her residence.

And once again the thought of missing loved ones whisked forward all the memories, and the treasured people who housed them . . . now gone forever. No one to call and be greeted in a thick Yiddish accent, the lilt of pleasant surprise, the sound of those stories retold from a living mouth. No one to meet her for breakfast in the King David Hotel lobby and chat about the odd trials of being married to a head of state. No one to call and confess, as she would have if she could, “
I’m depressed, Poppa. I’m so terribly depressed that I can hardly function; it’s the biggest challenge just getting out of bed. . . .
”

She shook her head, determined to rouse her emotions from the depths of grief. Glancing up beyond the front windshield, she saw Paris Square approaching—the busy interchange where not only would she turn left onto one of West Jerusalem’s busiest thoroughfares, but where large, vocal anti-Israeli protests often gathered.

A high wall caught the sun, casting its glare into her eyes—and she remembered. How could she have forgotten? The Great Synagogue, site of her father’s service, was hardly a block away, up King George Street.

A quick intake of breath and she quickly leaned forward from her position inside as—the long body of the Prime Minister’s armored limousine trembled between the crosshairs of anti-reflective binoculars protruding from the front drape of a large
kaffiyeh
, the ubiquitous Palestinian headdress, in the shadow of a quiet Rehavia rooftop.

The scout, a young Arab—ironically, not a Palestinian but an
Iraqi—breathed more quickly at the sight. Here, at last, what he’d waited for, all these long days.
The Jew she-dog was at last making her appearance
. He reached out with his free hand and picked up his cell phone.

He held his thumb over the speed dial button of a preprogrammed phone number.

Through his binoculars, the limousine prepared to turn onto Ramban Street. A disguised Red Cross van awaited them, parked innocuously along a busy sidewalk but loaded with fourteen thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate and a recipient cell phone whose ringer was wired to complete an electrical circuit. A tiny spark would trigger an explosion even the infidel Americans’ armored plating would not withstand.

His thumb minutely began a downward plunge as he saw the tires begin their swerve, and the oddly out-of-place Cadillac began to turn—and Hadassah called out to her driver, “Bernard, I’m so sorry, but could we go straight instead, please? I’d like to drive past the Great Synagogue. Just a small detour. It would mean so much to me. . . . ”

Bernard took a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and gave a light warning honk to the motorcycle escorts, whom he knew would soon despise him. Then he muttered a warning into his radio headpiece, corrected the wheel, and began to abort his turn. He did so broadly, giving the inside motorcycle room to not only heed his verbal warning but compensate for the change in direction and avoid being clipped.

The escort expertly evaded the limousine’s front bumper with an abrupt turn of his front wheel—almost jack-knifing on the wet pavement, the kind of impulsive maneuver a new rider might make under less challenging circumstances.