The Galilean Secret: A Novel (9 page)

“Making peace means helping the protesters . . . on both sides.”

“I wish more Israelis saw it that way.”

She slipped off his left shoe and sock. “They think peace activists are unpatriotic.” She examined his ankle and glanced up in concern. “You have a bad sprain. How’s your leg?”

“It’s sore where the bullet grazed me.” He heard a door slam in the distance and rolled onto his right side. Could Abdul have followed them?

She ducked and fell silent, glancing around nervously. When no one appeared, she surveyed the alley with fearful eyes. “I should not be talking to you.” She listened for danger.

He peered at her without trying to hide his surprise. “Why are you taking the risk?”

“Because my brother probably gave the order for the soldiers to fire.”

“Your brother? How can that be?”

“He’s Commander Ezra Sharett, an officer who serves in both Bil’in and Jerusalem. I want to make up for the pain he’s causing people.”

Karim stared at her, speechless. What she had said seemed too far-fetched to believe, yet she had no reason to lie. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You have no choice.”

She was right. If she left him, he couldn’t limp out of the alley alone. If he tried, he might encounter Abdul. Karim was stuck. At the same time, a Palestinian town was an unsafe place for an unaccompanied Jewish woman, so she needed him too. He wondered how she and her brother had arrived at opposing views of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then he thought of his father and remembered how deeply the conflict had divided them.

She withdrew a chemical ice pack from the first-aid kit, smacked it against the car door and nestled it on his ankle. He grimaced when he felt the cold. “You’re pretty good with that ice pack. Do you have another for my thigh?”

She grabbed a second ice pack, activated it and handed it to him. “I’m a doctor. I just started my residency at Hadassah-Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem.” She slid the ice pack onto the welt on his thigh caused by the bullet.

The more this spunky woman spoke, the more she neutralized Karim’s suspicions of Jews. Instead of distrusting her, he found himself wanting to know her, in spite of the alarms sounding in his head. He tried to look away, but her almond-shaped brown eyes, flawless olive complexion and finely chiseled profile held him spellbound. She was beautiful. A relationship with an Israeli Jew could never work for a Palestinian Muslim, but something inside him defied the warning. He extended a hand. “My name is Karim Musalaha, from Bethlehem.”

She hesitated a moment, before using her free hand to shake his. “I’m Rachel Sharett, from West Jerusalem.”

He shifted his weight to ease the sting of the ice packs. “You’re a doctor and an activist? How did that come about?”

She appeared caught off guard by his questions. After an uncomfortable silence, she said, “My father was killed by a suicide bomber on a bus. I’ll never forget the date—March 23rd a year ago. At first I wanted revenge like my brother—he reenlisted in the army and became friends with Itzak Kaufman, a Zionist professor with a national following. But I saw how bitter hate made him, and the killing on both sides seemed so endless and futile. I decided that working for peace was the only way out.”

Her mention of suicide bombings sent horror coursing through Karim. A year earlier his brother Saed had blown up a bus in West Jerusalem—on March 23rd.

“I’m very sorry about your father.” It was all he could manage to say. The Israelis were oppressors, and the Palestinians resorted to violence to resist them. He yearned to end the occupation as badly as Saed had, but not by taking innocent lives. Still, he doubted that the difference between Saed and him would matter to Rachel Sharett. If she knew the truth, she would dump him from the Jeep and drive away in revulsion. No matter how much danger she’d be in.

She fixed her gaze on him, her eyes glassy. “It has been more than a year, but the loss,

well. . . .” Her voice quivered. “Ezra takes out his rage on the Palestinians. If he saw me at the demonstration, he will take it out on me later, as usual. He doesn’t understand how I could be as committed to the two-state solution as he is to crushing Palestinian terrorists.” She began to wrap the ice pack onto his ankle with an Ace bandage. “What drew you to the peace movement?”

Karim brought the back of his seat up—anything to stifle his raging feelings about his own family conflict and his fear that Abdul Fattah would catch him and return him to his father. “My mother died in childbirth at the A-Ram checkpoint. I grew up hating the occupation.”

She stopped wrapping his ankle. “I am so sorry. . . . A-Ram is a tough checkpoint. The only good thing about it is the little girl that protesters have painted on the separation wall.”

“I’ve seen her too. She’s being carried over the wall by a cluster of balloons. We have a name for her in Arabic—
Rajiya
. It means ‘hopeful.’” He wiped beads of sweat from his upper lip. “I worry that time is running out. The only hope is for people on both sides to live the teachings of their religions.”

She finished wrapping his ankle and stared at him, her expression stern. “If you really believe that, you’ll join the March for Peace in Jerusalem in two-and-a-half weeks. I’m a founder of one of the organizing groups, the Abrahamic Peace Initiative. We want to mobilize thousands of demonstrators from many countries to surround the holy sites and pray for peace. We hope the media attention in Israel and the United States, as well as in Europe and the Arab states, will create a groundswell of momentum for the two-state solution. I’ve been invited to speak at a publicity rally in Jerusalem on Monday.”

He pointed at his leg. “I won’t be joining any demonstrations for a while.”

She stood. “I can understand how you feel. It’s risky. But time is running out, and if the two-state solution isn’t implemented soon, it will be too late.”

Before she finished speaking, Karim noticed two Israeli soldiers approaching from about fifty meters away. He pointed at them.

Rachel shot a glance at the soldiers. “Keep your head down until I say otherwise.” She slammed the door, ran around the front of the car and leapt into the driver’s seat. She started the engine: the car lurched forward, gravel spinning under the wheels.

Karim gripped the dashboard as the Jeep made a U-turn. “Where are we going?”

“To my apartment in Jerusalem. It’s the only place you’ll be safe while you recover.”

A cry of protest rose in his throat. A Palestinian man and a Jewish woman could never be safe together. Especially in Jerusalem. If caught there without a permit, he’d be arrested and jailed. He wanted to scream,
No! Jerusalem is too dangerous—I can’t go there!
But instead he swallowed the protest. For reasons he didn’t fully understand, he was willing to take the risk in order to be with Rachel Sharett.

West Jerusalem

Tuesday, April 2

RACHEL SHARETT’S BEWILDERED EXPRESSION CAUGHT KARIM OFF GUARD. He limped into the kitchen of her cramped apartment, freshly dressed after a shower. The long tunic and loose-fitting pants of his navy-colored
salwar kameez
usually offered him comfort and security. But when he saw what she held in her hands, he felt naked, as if her penetrating stare could read his thoughts and see inside his fears. “Where did you get that?” he asked.

“In front of the couch.”

The conviction in her voice reminded him of her tone at Bil’in. The memory of getting shot at the demonstration tightened his stomach into a knot. Without her help, he could have been arrested, more seriously injured or even killed. Instead she had sneaked him into West Jerusalem in the back of her Jeep and offered him her apartment as a place to recover. A nap on her couch followed by a shower had soothed his throbbing wounds and washed the dust and gassy odor off his body. But Rachel’s questioning eyes set his stomach churning again.

She sat at the small kitchen table within arm’s reach of the stove and sink. “You must have dropped these pages when you lay down for your nap.”

Karim stared in disbelief at the translation of the letter from Jesus of Nazareth to Mary Magdalene. The tiny room began to close in around him. As thankful as he was for the chance to rest at Rachel’s apartment, he needed to get out of West Jerusalem. No Palestinian was safe here. “A friend gave me this letter.” He took the translation from her, folded it into a square and stuffed it into the pocket of his collarless
shalwar
.

Rachel’s eyes followed his hand. “Is this some kind of prank? Could Jesus of Nazareth have written this letter? And what do you make of the entries by the woman named Judith of Jerusalem?”

Karim shrugged. “The antiquities business is full of hoaxes. Then again, it has given the world ancient treasures.”

Rachel stood and moved closer to him. “Have you read the New Testament?”

“Yes, at Birzeit University.”

“So have I.” She tapped her foot nervously on the tile floor. “This letter contains phrases found in the Gospels and explains them in fascinating ways.”

He stepped back, caught off guard by Rachel’s revelations. “Did you read all of the pages?”

“I didn’t intend to. Then I saw who had supposedly written the letter and I became intrigued. As a Jew, I of course have mixed feelings about Jesus of Nazareth. His followers have caused my people great suffering, yet he, too, was Jewish, and I have always admired him as a teacher.” Rachel bit her lip. “I kept reading because the letter’s insights about love . . . I don’t know, they were just so powerful, and Judith’s story, even though it’s incomplete, well . . .” She lowered her eyes as if embarrassed to be speaking of love to him, a stranger in her home. “If the letter and the diary are authentic, they’re priceless. I kept wondering where you got the translation and where the original is.”

Karim met her gaze only for a moment, nervous about saying too much, especially to an Israeli. But she grasped his arm, her eyes searching his. “I can understand your reluctance to tell me more,” she said, “but now that I know your secret, don’t you see that I have an interest in protecting the letter too?”

The hum of her refrigerator and the honks of the car horns outside competed with Karim’s jumbled thoughts. “I’ve just met you, and we’re from different worlds. I’m not sure what to make of the letter, let alone how to discuss it with an . . . an Israeli.”

Karim tried to look away, but Rachel kept her eyes trained on his. “I would like to meet your friend. You have nothing to fear by introducing me to him. If the letter is a fake, it’s worthless and no one will care about it. But if the original is genuine, it’s perhaps the most valuable artifact ever found. It would be worth untold millions—and the letter’s revelation of love could be used to create peace. Maybe it’s just what we need.”

Karim felt the blood drain from his cheeks. He hadn’t intended to tell anyone—and certainly not an Israeli—about the translation, let alone the original scroll. Had Jesus really written the letter? Or was it written by an impostor? As a Muslim, Karim had been reluctant to explore the question further. This Jewish woman was showing no such reluctance. But could he trust her? “I—”

The doorbell rang, cutting him off.

Rachel got up and spoke into the intercom on the kitchen wall. “Who is it?”

“It’s Ezra. It’s important.”

She glanced at Karim with terror in her eyes. “It’s my brother.” After buzzing Ezra through the downstairs door, she grabbed Karim’s arm and said, “Come quickly. You must hide.” She led him into her bedroom and checked the closet. Seeing that it was full, she motioned toward the bed, but when she looked under it, she said, “The space is too narrow. You’ll have to squeeze into the closet. Be careful where you step.”

He parted the clothes. There were two shoe shelves at the bottom, stacked one on top of the other. Since the shelves spanned the width of the closet, he had no choice but to stand on them. He climbed in and closed the door as Rachel ran from the room. When the shelves bowed under his weight, he relieved the stress by grabbing the bar on which the clothes hung.

Darkness engulfed him. Suspended precariously, he was barely able to breathe. When he heard Rachel greet her brother, he realized that she had left the bedroom door open.

“Were you in Bil’in today?” Ezra’s tone smoldered with accusation. “One of my soldiers said he saw you.”

“Why would I deny it?” Rachel spoke with confidence. “I will keep protesting the separation barrier until it’s dismantled.”

Karim cocked an ear toward the door, straining to hear.

Ezra went on, “Will you also throw rocks at my soldiers? You know that we have orders to protect ourselves. And worse yet, I hear that you helped a Palestinian who’d been shot. Is that true?”