Hadassah Covenant, The (20 page)

With a minimum of fanfare, a petite, elegantly clad woman bearing the unmistakable features of the First Lady of Israel had quietly walked into the room. But the improbability of it . . .

He was standing now, shakily. Gaining his balance, he stood for a long moment, glaring at the newcomer, as though trying to choose between several reasons to be angry or impressed.

“I . . . I don’t understand. This is not only highly inappropriate but cruel. This is an affront. Do you intend for me to stand for this? Ma’am, I make it a policy never to insult people I have never met before, yet I must also say that with all respect for your position, I have no intention to sit here and be politically ambushed by a member of—”

“The Kesselman family, Mr. al-Khalid? Or should I say . . .” Her voice lilted upward and nearly edged into a taunting tone but stopped just short.

“
. . . Uncle
?”

Chapter Twenty

A
l-Khalid snorted and
grabbed his cane, eyeing the door. “That’s it. I will not be mocked by anyone—”

“Please.” Her tone was a bit above plaintive. “I mean absolutely no ambush, nor disrespect. I was never told. Please believe me. I was never told anything except that my aunt Rivke perished. I never knew of your existence until last week. I promise you. Would you
please
stay?”

He stopped in midstride, utterly taken aback by her words. He turned and stared long into her eyes, clearly trying to assess her sincerity. But, of course, there was no reason for her to lie. . . .

He relaxed, lowered his arm, and looked around him, exhaling deeply.

“I apologize for the manner in which this happened,” she continued. “But I had no idea how to initiate contact with you. I believed that inviting you to Jerusalem was out of the question. Even security dictated that I not allow any pause between informing you of my intentions and our initial face-to-face meetings. You see, there are a great many urgent reasons for us to talk. More than you might imagine.”

“Fine,” he grumbled, “but if we talk, then all these functionaries must leave the room. There are private issues at hand.”

Hadassah nodded her agreement and gave the ambassador an apologetic glance.

“My apologies, Mr. Ambassador,” al-Khalid said, barely covering a gloating tone.

The ambassador nodded gravely and turned to leave with the rest.

“However,” said Hadassah, “my bodyguards insist on staying.”

“You mean you came halfway across a continent to locate a lost uncle, and then suspect that he might harm you?”

“No. It’s merely the rules. You may have heard that I was nearly killed recently.”

“Yes. Well, then I’m gone. If you can’t trust me with your personal safety, we have no basis to discuss anything else. Really . . .”

He gathered up his cane once more.

Hadassah faced her lead bodyguard with a direct stare. The Mossad agent shrugged.

“All right,” she said. “No bodyguards.”

He sat down more emphatically than before, as if to punctuate the repetition of it. After all it was his second time to sit in the same chair within a quarter hour.

Hadassah sat in the opposite chair, looked around to a now-vacant room, sighed deeply, and took her first true, appraising look at the man.

“May I call you uncle? For I believe that you are . . .” She stopped to watch him stare at her, his eyes glimmering with tears, his lips moving silently in a vain attempt to form a reply.

“Yes, you may,” he finally managed. “And what do I call you?”

“Hadassah would be wonderful. Just Hadassah.”

“First of all,” she began, “I truly wish to ask for forgiveness. I must tell you that I’m here on a fishing expedition, but a highly important one. It started the night when my father died. He whispered something which led me to an apparent family secret. One from which I was most definitely excluded. And that expedition has led me to you.”

“Then, Hadassah, I must ask for your forgiveness as well. You see,
I cannot offer you my condolences upon your father’s death.”

She straightened awkwardly in her seat. “Why is that?”

“It is terrible to lose a father, as I learned myself at an all-too-young age. And I do not wish to insult your grief. However, your father was no friend of mine. No friend at all. I would say, actually, that he ruined my life.”

Hadassah held absolutely still in her seat, genuine surprise engulfing her features. “I’m shocked. I did not know my father had any enemies.”

“I was never his enemy, Hadassah. At least I have not been for a very long time. I wish him no harm. I have made my peace with the past. But as you learn more, perhaps you will understand.”

“I hope so. Understanding is one of my objectives. Let me start at the beginning of this search. The only thing I was ever told of my aunt Rivke was that she perished. For many years, I could have sworn that I was explicitly told she had perished in the
Shoah
. But now I realize that her actual fate was never explained to me. I merely filled in the blanks. Incorrectly, as it turns out. The word
perished
was always used in reference to her fate. And that was a word my family never used except in a historical context. Usually, discussing our relatives murdered by the Nazis.”

“I can assure you, she survived,” he said with a faraway look. “She survived the Holocaust by several years.”

“And this is what I do not understand. Neither my family nor my other relatives were given to falsehoods.”

“I think I can explain,” al-Khalid said flatly.

“What is it?”

“Your father meant that she had died not because she had ceased to physically exist, but because he had said Shiva over her. He declared her dead.”

Hadassah shook her head in bewilderment. “I’m sorry—what in the world do you mean?”

“Maybe I should start at the beginning.”

Al-Khalid shifted in his seat and took a deep breath. “Surely you’re aware of your father’s 1941 traverse across Hungary to Trieste with a group of his closest family members.”

“Yes, I am. Or at least, I thought I was.”

“Well, Rivke was with him on that journey. She used to spend hours describing the two months they spent sneaking along country roads at night, sleeping in haylofts and forest glens, living off the stores in their backpacks and whatever fruit or produce they could scrounge from the fields. When they reached Trieste, they stowed away aboard a ship with the help of one of David’s childhood friends, who was a sailor aboard a cargo vessel.”

“Yes, this much I’ve heard.”

“Oh, well . . . then you probably know how they reached London and were given refuge by their second cousins, the Rosensweigs.”

“Yes.”

“Then I suppose, the new part of this story begins four years later. You know, I met Rivke not twenty yards away from where we sit right now. She and her brothers had come, like so many before them, to see what an Israeli embassy would look like. I spotted her in the crowd. She was . . . stunning. Especially on that day. Her hair was long and free, her eyes sparkled. She had the glowing skin of someone who has just regained her health after a long illness. She was with her brothers, teasing, bantering, beaming, laughing more freely and openly than she probably ever would again—simply from the sheer joy of seeing for herself that there really was a State of Israel. I’m sure it was the best day of her life.”

He let out a sigh that ended in a sob.

“That is, until our eyes met.”

He closed his eyes, seemingly fighting back tears, and fell silent. For several minutes Hadassah felt it would be sacrilege to urge him on.

Finally, she lightly touched his arm. “How did you meet her?”

His chuckle was wistful. “I was a confident young man back then. And I certainly cut a more dashing figure than I do today. But there was more. Something incredible passed between us in that moment our eyes locked onto each other. Her smile did not diminish one bit. Even though I was a stranger, she seemed to realize immediately that I was reveling in her smile, and everything it represented, as much as anyone with her. So my stare only added to her joy, and she just continued to ride the crest of her bliss and included me in its warmth. Just wrapped me up in that smile. Such generosity of spirit . . . And
for the first time ever with a girl that beautiful, I did not wince, waver or glance away. So when the moment had passed, I simply walked up, offered my hand, and introduced myself. The instant our fingers touched, her brothers fell completely silent. By the time our hands parted, it was already clear that something remarkable was in the offing.”

“But then you believe my father saw you as a threat.”

“Of a sort. It was only natural—he had been her protector for so long now. They had learned the year before that their parents had died, so he acted in every way as her father.”

“Yes, and now here you were, cutting a dashing figure, as you said. . . . ”

“And I did what any dashing young man would do. I asked her, in my best calm voice, if I might take her to dinner. She glanced over at her brother—your father—ever so quickly, in a way that told me his assent would be required. And he fixed me with this piercing look and said in a flat voice I will never forget, ‘How about you meet us for Shabbat tomorrow. What shul do you attend?’ I looked at him and asked, ‘Shul?’ Because you see, I was not raised in the faith.”

“You are not Jewish?” she exclaimed.

Al-Khalid shrugged, raising his eyebrows.
There’s the question . . .
. “Your father then shook his head in disgust and used the word he thought a lesser Jew might recognize. ‘Synagogue. You’ve heard of a synagogue?’ And I nodded my head yes, although I had never set foot in one of those, either.”

“I’m sorry. I-I’m becoming very confused,” she stammered.

He held up his hand with a look that said,
One more minute, please, and you’ll understand
.

“And then I heard the voice I hated most in the world. The anglicized, un-Jewish, high-British voice of the same attache who’d been making my life miserable the whole week prior. He marched up and interrupted me with these words I will never forget: ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Kesselman. But as we both know, Shabbat services are only for Jews.’ At that moment a look of such disdain filled your father David’s eyes that I had to look away. I’m sure it wasn’t that he hated all Gentiles. He simply thought I had been trying to deceive him and his sister.”

“Why would an embassy official presume to insert himself like that? Into a private conversation that was none of his business?”

“Because he considered it every bit his business. You see, I was under an Esther Edict. And he was the one who had placed it on me.”

Chapter Twenty-one

A
n Esther Edict
? I’ve never heard of such a thing!” Hadassah exclaimed.

“They were quite common in those days. An absolute order not to divulge that one is Jewish. Its name is taken from Mordecai’s admonition to Esther to hide her true identity.”

“So you actually
were
Jewish? And the Israeli government asked you to do this? Why would they require that?”

Al-Khalid nodded sadly. “Another long story. For your purposes, it starts nine years before, when I arrived on a passenger ship from Kuwait. I grew up in Iraq—Baghdad, actually, where my family was one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential business dynasties. My father once owned the largest, most successful textile plant in the Middle East, employing several thousand people. He advised the Iraqi prime minister. Supplied uniforms to the Iraqi Army. Sold most of the black silk used by Iraqi women in making
Abayahs
, the body-length veil worn by the most conservative Muslims. Women were not forced to wear them in those days, although many chose to do so. But life was good. Jews were known as
dhimmis
back then, a protected minority with guaranteed freedom of worship. Half the
seats on Baghdad’s municipal council were held by Jews. The
M’halat-el ’Yhud
, the Jewish quarter, occupied nearly a fourth of all Baghdad, and one hundred thirty-seven thousand people lived in it. But that all ended one summer night in 1941.”