Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

‘Uri! Come here!’

There, as if engraved into the page, were the inkless markings of what she hoped was Hebrew handwriting. She imagined it: Baruch Kishon taking the call from Shimon Guttman, scribbling a note on his message pad, peeling it off, rushing out the door-leaving the impression of the note on the page below.

Uri saw it, too. He held the piece of paper above his head, trying to divine its meaning through the ceiling light. He squinted and he grimaced until eventually he gave a small smile. ‘It’s a name,’ he said. ‘An Arabic name. The man we want is called Afif Aweida.’

JERUSALEM ,THE PREVIOUS THURSDAY

This was the sound Shimon Guttman wanted to hear, the throb of carnival. The whistles, blown repeatedly; the steady pounding of dustbin lids; the clamour that could only be generated by a group of people strong in number and, above all, strong in conviction.

He had been at a hundred demonstrations in his time, but this one made him prouder than all the rest. The crowd, gathered here at Zion Square, was enormous, a mass of people packed together, some carrying placards, the rest either waving their fists in the air or clapping in unison. They looked striking, each one of them clad in orange. T-shirts, hats, even shorts and face-paint, all in the brightest, most luminous orange. But what made Shimon tremble with pride, a glow rising from deep within, was that this massed rally against Yariv and his treachery consisted entirely of the young.

When he had issued the call, he had no idea if it would be heeded. The conventional wisdom these days held that Israel’s young had grown apathetic. They were the internet generation, more concerned with Google than the Golan, happier bumming around India or trekking in Nepal than pioneering in Judea or tilling the soil in Samaria. His own son, Uri, who had given up a career in army intelligence to pursue some limp-wristed job in films, was proof of the malaise.

Yet here was compelling evidence that such pessimism about the state of Israel’s youth was misplaced. Look at them, Guttman thought, massed on the streets, determined to save their nation from the surrender and appeasement plotted by their own prime minister. Those of his contemporaries who always moaned about kids today, complaining that they wouldn’t have the gumption to fight the way our lot did back in sixty-seven-they should be here now. This sight would soon shut them up.

For this was shaping up to be a fight, good and proper. Facing the army of orange, separated by a thin line of police and the odd news photographer and TV cameraman, was another crowd, nearly as packed, almost as vociferous. They had no single colour, but just as many placards as their opponents. He saw one, carefully placed near the news crews, that read simply, and in English: Yes to Peace .

Shimon Guttman had been at the head of the orange column-one of only a half dozen oldies granted such elevated status-but as the trouble started, they were ushered out of the way. Partly for the seniors’ own safety, partly he suspected to allow the young men of action to get stuck in. From his vantage point on the sidelines he could see that this would soon descend into a medieval pitched battle, two armies charging at each other. All that was missing were the horses.

Soon a young man was emerging, an orange Venus from the water, out of the crowd, elevated by some hidden hand until he was able to stand unsteadily on somebody’s shoulders to deliver his speech. As the youngster barked into a megaphone, Guttman concluded that he was an inexperienced speaker, unaware that, when amplified, it wasn’t necessary to shout.

Shimon was smiling, reflecting back on his younger self, when a pleasing thought dawned on him. The movement he had helped build was, after all, in safe hands. Whatever perfidy Yariv had in mind, there was a new generation ready to arise and resist. ‘I am not needed here,’ Guttman thought. He quietly withdrew, happy to let the young people get on without him. It also meant he would now gain a precious hour in a day jammed with this rally, a television debate this evening and a strategy meeting with Shapira and the settlers’ council in between. He checked his watch. The sensible course would be to slope off to a café, have a smoke and recharge his batteries. But Guttman decided he would grant himself a rare treat. He would go somewhere else entirely.

A quick visit wouldn’t delay him too badly. As he walked through the Jaffa Gate, ignoring the kids hawking cans of soda and postcards of the Old City, turning into the Arab market, he realized that this was his greatest weakness. Other men could be diverted from their duty by wine or women, but Shimon Guttman had only one comparable passion. Drift the scent of the ancient past before his nostrils and he would forget everything else. He would be a bloodhound, following the trail until he had found his prey.

He walked briskly down the cobbled alleys of the shouk , as the Israelis referred to it, a soft ‘sh’ where the Arabs would sound an ‘s’. Not that Israelis ever came here. Since the first intifada in the late 1980s, few Jewish Israelis dared set foot inside the Old City, except of course for the Jewish Quarter and the Kotel , the Western Wall. It had become a no-go area; a spate of fatal stabbings had seen to that.

But Guttman was not frightened. He believed as a matter of principle that Jews should have full access to all of their capital city, that they should not be intimidated into retreat from any part of it. That was one reason why he had left Kiryat Arba when he did. His comrades in the settler movement were populating the outer edges of Samaria and stretching to the beach shores of Gaza, but they were neglecting the beating heart of the Land of Israel, the heart of Zion: Jerusalem. The Israeli right were taking the eternal city for granted, not realizing that, as they stretched out their hand to liberate land elsewhere, the great pearl of Jerusalem was slipping from their grasp. If they were not careful, they would find they had lost East Jerusalem the way the British acquired an empire: in a fit of absent-mindedness.

So Shimon Guttman made it his business to travel around the mainly Arab eastern part of the city as freely as he would amble around the predominantly Jewish west. True, he didn’t come here anything like as often as, ideologically speaking, he should. True, too, that he looked over his shoulder every five or six steps and that his heart raced the instant he left behind the smooth stone and scrubbed, lit streets of the Jewish Quarter for the dust and noise of the Arab neighbourhoods. Still, he tried to walk as relaxedly as he could given those constraints, like a man who was simply strolling in his home city. As if he owned the place. Which, as a matter of principle, he believed he did.

There were a few shops he stopped into whenever he was in the market, which, he now realized, he had not visited for well over a year. (The campaign against Yariv had been all-consuming; everything else had slipped.) He checked in at the first, whose entrance was obscured by rail after rail of leather bags, satchels and purses. They had a pot that was intriguing, but hard to date. The second and third shops were apologetic; they had sold the best stuff and were waiting for more. They didn’t need to spell out where these new shipments would be coming from: Iraq had transformed the entire trade. A fourth had some coins which Shimon made a note of: he would tell his friend Yehuda, an obsessive numismatist, to stop being such a wimp and take a trip down here.

He was heading out when he caught a glimpse of the shop he had almost forgotten. Like the rest here, it had no front window, just a pile of merchandise outside which extended inside. To enter was to stand in the narrow floor space that was not filled with stuff, a canyon of goods on either side. At eye level and above, there was silverware, candlesticks mainly, including several of the nine-branched variety, the traditional menorah used by Jews during the festival of Chanukah. It always struck Guttman as the ultimate in commercial pragmatism, this willingness of the Arab traders to sell Jewish kitsch.