CHAPTER 2

7 MARCH, 3:20 A.M.

Dearest Jean,

Meral is the saddest of men. I saw him again at the Tomb of Lazarus this morning. It touched my heart. All the tourists had clambered up the jagged stone steps of the darkened crypt into terrifying light, the stunning last of them a tall black woman from Texas, her hair in tin curlers that danced in the sun as she emerged crying, “Praise be to God!”, her face a glory. When she’d ambled to the others picking over remembrances in the Lazarus Tomb Souvenir Shop, I boarded the dilapidated dusty old tour bus, sat alone amid its empty rows of seats and thought about dead men walking out of their graves. A storm was blowing in. Whipping gusts set up a moan at the yellowed windowpanes and the air in the bus turned gray. On a slope above the tomb there’s a shabby little house, a poor family of seven or eight, perhaps more; and it was when I glanced over at their brightly colored laundry flapping billowed on a line above a tether of goats that I spotted him. Meral. He was just as I had seen him there once before. A tall and imposing, strongly built man, yet looking somehow crumpled in his blue winter uniform, he was seated at the wheel of his police car wistfully staring at the entrance to the tomb. For as long as I watched him he was utterly motionless, his head slightly tilted to the side as if pondering some hopeless expectation. Poor Meral. His parents, all his brethren, are dead, as are his wife and only child, a beloved young son. Coming home at noon on the five-year-old’s birthday at a time when they lived in the country’s north, Meral thought to surprise him, the story is told, and had parked his jeep out of sight behind a hill and then hurried toward his house with a blaze of bright sunflowers clutched in front of him—they were the little boy’s favorite flower—and a stuffed toy dinosaur tucked behind his back. The little boy, who had spied him through a kitchen window, raced out of their house with a radiant smile, his slender bare arms outstretched to greet him, when a whim-launched rocket from across the border fell upon his life with a sound he never heard. Soon afterward, cancer took Meral’s wife. That was four years ago. Meral still mourns. He is a man who seems to ache at the slightest parting, always turning, when he leaves you, for a long glance back as if against the possibility he might never see you again. When we were leaving and the engine of the bus roared to life, a mist of rain began to fall on that quickening dust and as we left him, forlorn amid the dead white stones, Meral’s gaze was still fixed upon the tomb.

Quiet Meral. Honest Meral. One day I must touch him.

I was glad to get back to Old Jerusalem and its bustling vaulted bazaars, the pungent scent of ground cardamom and new leather and the tumble of countless church bells ringing; to its jostling hurly-burly and the women with trays of warm bread on their heads and the blue-and-white uniformed, dreamy-eyed children singing as they march in neat columns to school, their little voices made hollow by the high stone walls on narrow dark streets that abruptly burst out into sun like a sudden and unexpected glimpse of joy; to where the blind always travel in pairs, hand in hand.

It is here that I will find him, the one that I am hunting.

He is here in this city of crumbling stone.

I must stop. My mind is on Meral.

Your Paul