Rockets flew over Gaza and Israel. Between outbreaks, Hafiz struggled to keep a lock on his anger. It was beyond comprehension. The Americans lavished money on the Zionists, moved their embassy to Jerusalem, and refused to open their eyes. The Zionists talked themselves deaf about their liberty and their security. It was as the Prophet had said—God might as well have given the precious treasures of the Torah and the Gospel to an ass. In time, there was the excursion to Norway—on a private airplane—and at last Jamila awaiting him as he floated to the ground at Amman. It was compensation enough.
Jamila’s father kept a peacock in his garden in East Jerusalem, and Hafiz had heard the peacock’s cry many mornings from his house. The families had long known each other; it was only natural for Jamila’s father to agree to the marriage, even though Hafiz’s father had lost his property. Among the leading families there was an understanding about Hafiz, and the family of Jamila welcomed him. Although she had traveled widely, had attended university in New York City, the instinct for home was strong in her. The peacock, the bird of Suleiman, had brought them back together, he joked.
He took walks with Jamila in the evenings among the sedative trees of the Mount of Olives, and she came to understand hazily why he wore the ring and why he kept his eye on the Qubbet. Above them, the Dome receded into the sunset; at these times, the oath he had sworn melted from his memory with the last rays of day. Then, on a blue afternoon in the fall, when he was walking there with Jamila, an explosion slashed the air from the direction of the city. The Israelis had decided to open an ancient tunnel along the base of the Temple Mount, and there was rioting in the Muslim quarter. Many bombs followed that one; for months, he worked harder than ever before, but then the Second Intifada began, and with it his wife’s long decline and the painfully sweet adoption of Nasir. She could not have children, but she had desperately wanted Nasir—if only to fill the emptiness that was coming for Hafiz.
For forty years, he had worn the ring while the darkness gathered and deepened around him. King Suleiman had used his ring to summon the jinn, enslaving them to build his great mosque. The cry of the bird of Suleiman would announce the Last Day, it was said. It was time now, thought Hafiz. It was past time. Martyrs prepare themselves for forty days; surely forty years was more than enough.
Hafiz had put on his uncle’s ring just before he buried him and had never taken it off. But he had wanted Nasir to have a new ring. There was too much blood on the old one. He had told Nasir to bury him with the old ring and thus bury the old blood. Hafiz had hoped to wear it until the Day—now that hope was in his son.
Simon Winter Centre for Genetic Research, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1015h
Joseph Rappaport closed his eyes for a few moments. At last the chaos caused by Emanuel Shor’s death was settling—files closed, police gone, himself appointed temporary Director. He had spent the morning putting his electronic signature on documents, including dozens of applications for information from the Cohanim database, all from America. As soon as possible, he would shunt this duty off on the assistant directors. The whole thing bored him.
Rappaport had never understood Manny Shor’s obsession with the old Cohanim database. It had been well picked over for years by snobs, genealogists, and medical people researching obscure diseases.
To Rappaport, the monoamine oxidase project was so much more compelling. To experiment with the genes that made people violent, that moved them to hatred—monoamine research promised to get at the root of this ancient curse. Some of Rappaport’s distant cousins from Venice had been transported and exterminated in the closing days of the Holocaust. Even growing up near New York, he himself had felt from some people an occasional coolness, the barest hint of disapproval of his face, of his name. Then, late one day in the time of Trump, he had gone from the lab to his tiny office in the Life Sciences building to find a drawing of a swastika hanging on the door. At first he felt afraid—he had looked around in terror at the darkening corridors—but then curiously fascinated. From that hour he was determined to find out what might be locked in the human codes that controlled the temperature of the heart—from cold looks to flaming fanaticism.
But Manny had shown little interest in the monoamine project that now funded most of the laboratory’s work. The Cohanim thing brought in a big donation now and then from an American Jew who wanted to know if his ancestors were priests. Rappaport wondered why Americans, so proud of their independence and individualism, still needed to make these links. Leaving America for Israel had caused him no concern at all—it didn’t matter to him where he lived, so long as the project he worked on was interesting. He felt no more connected to Haifa, Israel, than he did to his old neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This linkage others felt to a land or to a people or to a story—or to a God—was a mystery to him. He looked around his desk at the photos of Ernst Schrödinger, of Watson and Crick, of Stanley Cohen—these were his heroes, the people who explained life instead of romanticizing it. As a boy, he had read Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? and knew that he would spend his life answering that question.
He had once asked Manny how he envisioned the world to come, and Manny had told him that, for a Jew, Heaven would be to sit peacefully in a garden with a minyan of brothers who love one another, learning and discussing Torah for eternity. Although the agnostic Rappaport had smiled at this, the vision suggested something to him. He would not admit it to anyone, but it moved him in the same way as the still meadows and waters of the Twenty-Third Psalm, which was the only part of the Bible he remembered.
Although Rappaport did not believe in the world to come, he began to envision a world here and now where people would no long fear each other, but would sit down in peace and put their minds to work instead of their hatreds. To gain dominion over those old foes—prejudice and violence—surely that was worth his life’s work. Rappaport was not one of those geneticists who looked for more and more specialized diseases to conquer; he was interested in the universal disease of hate.
Thus, the monoamine project. As a young scientist, he had read about a dozen men from the same Dutch family sent to prison because they were uncontrollably violent. One was a notorious street bully, and another had raped and knifed his own sister. All the men had a mutation on MAO-A1, a monoamine oxidase gene. He began to wonder: could violence and hate be genetically conditioned? Could a few manipulations of the human genome put an end to prejudice, terror, crime—perhaps even war? Could the very nature of humanity be changed?
His goal was never articulated that way, but Rappaport spent the next twenty years working on it. The best work was being done at Technion; thus, he had come to Technion. He had reduced herds of animals to docility, tracked and manipulated the DNA of hundreds of criminals, and was reasonably sure that he knew how to proceed. As usual, however, the ethicists got in the way of the kind of experiments he wanted to do. He was more bemused than disappointed; after all, even the great James Watson had at one time called for a moratorium on DNA research out of fear that plagues might be accidentally unleashed. Still, he found it ironic that the Ethics Committee should stand in the way of making people more peaceful.
Manny had laughed at his ideas. “Peace is not just the lack of violence,” he had said. Rappaport had not known how to respond to this; to him, the elimination of violence seemed contribution enough. The director’s lack of interest in the monoamine project had hampered progress, but now Rappaport saw his way clear. A tragic death—in Rappaport’s world, Manny would not have died this way—but the past was Manny’s business, the future Rappaport’s.
There would be no more excursions to Jerusalem to wait alongside Manny Shor while he stared at King David’s Tomb. Many times the old man had coaxed him into coming up to the city with him, primarily because Manny was not a confident driver. He would chatter about Moshiach ben David and the world to come, about the royal priesthood and lineage, about the ludicrous prospect of digging for King David’s DNA. Long meetings with puzzled officials always ended with a pilgrimage to the Tomb, a marble monolith jammed into a little building on the south end of the city. It did no good to tell him again that it was not the Tomb of King David, that it was a Christian monument dating to the Crusades. He knew that as well as anyone; he went over and over the dilettantish archeological diagrams that pretended to show the location of the real tomb, needling the historic-preservation people about this or that possibility, checking to see who