The Last Ember by Daniel Levin

Author:Daniel Levin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Temple Mount (Jerusalem), Lawyers, Treasure troves, Antiquities, Legal, Fiction, Literary, New York, Suspense, General, Thrillers, Rome (Italy), New York (State), Archaeological thefts, Espionage
ISBN: 9781594484605
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-05-04T04:45:03.398873+00:00

47

Ramat Mansour stood in the doorway of his house at the top of Silwan, an Arab village on a dry white hillside in the shadow of the walls of the Temple Mount. Mansour was a neat, thin man with a well-trimmed black mustache. After an afternoon nap, his kaffiyeh and black coil were still unfurled and draped around his neck as he passed his youngest child, a baby boy, back into his wife’s arms. Reluctantly, he buttoned his cotton dishdasha and fastened his sandals. Walking across a loose-gravel path, he passed his small shop of ancient coins and pottery, and checked the corrugated steel door padlocked to a bolt in the stone.

He lit a Parliament cigarette and scratched his mustache where his first hairs of gray were beginning to show.

He continued up the gravel slope of the Bab Huttah road to the Dome of the Rock. The ascent used to be a journey of immense joy for Mansour. He remembered making the pilgrimage with his father at the start of every day from their home in Silwan. But now Mansour was scarcely able to look at the al-Aqsa’s minaret without regretting the so-called excavations of the Waqf.

It had been more than a year since a man from the Waqf came into the shop and said Mansour’s graduate work in archaeology at Birzeit University could be useful. Mansour had naively hoped the Waqf was interviewing for an archaeologist’s position. He quickly closed up his shop and ran home to get his academic recommendations, kissing his new wife and newborn son for bet-tawfee inshallah, good luck.

But when he returned home to them that next morning, he was dazed, his face caked in gray mud. It was as though he had been forced unwittingly to commit a crime greater than he could have imagined.

“They said it was for excavation,” Mansour told his wife in a frightened whisper. “But they had bulldozers and dozens of men with pickaxes.” Fists clenched, he described how they instructed the men to rip up delicate Herodian mosaic floors and Byzantine glass, how they bulldozed through an ornately designed dome in the anteroom of Solomon’s stables. They were told to mix up the strata to make certain no one could sift through the piles and determine a useful archaeological record. Mansour had been raised by his father with the Islamic virtue of respecting the remains of the two Temples that once stood on the Mount.

When he was finished speaking he opened his hand and his wife gasped, for Mansour held the one piece of antiquity he had been able to save. Shimmering in the morning light, it was a beautiful piece of Roman glass, green as jade with an inset carving of the Temple columns on its bottom. The next day, Mansour anonymously left it at the door of the Bible Lands Museum in West Jerusalem. Months later, he brought his wife and children to the museum. He was proud to see the glass safely resting in a shaft of light in the center of a display case.

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