Authors: Glenn Kleier
Hunter tolerated interruptions poorly. But his irritation evaporated quickly as he opened the door to a very striking young woman flanked by two seemingly unworthy male companions. It was one of the WNN support teams, hurriedly arrived from Cairo, he learned. They'd come in style, traveling in a fully equipped, self-sufficient, forty-foot mobile video RV.
Romema Ilit housing development, Jerusalem, Israel 5:50
A.M
., Saturday, January 1, 2000
I
n his dream, Feldman was a child again. He was studying his catechism with his beautiful, dark-haired mother. But try as he might, he couldn't remember any of his lessons, and it disappointed her greatly. He sighed and stared down at his text once more, but it had changed.
Instead of catechism, it was the Talmud. He looked back up into his father's face this time. His father was frowning, speaking to Feldman sternly in Yiddish, but Feldman couldn't understand. Feldman closed his eyes, crying, and he heard his mother's voice, soothing now, comforting. “Jon, Jon, it's okay, shush.”
He opened his eyes and the face was now Anke's. Her hair was down around her bare shoulders, a thin-strapped nightgown falling delicately across her breasts. She was smiling and whispering. “You were having a nightmare, Jon. I heard you all the way downstairs.”
The moon was up now and half full, infiltrating the room with a creamy light. Feldman was embarrassed. “What did I say?”
Anke laughed softly. “You were calling for your parents. First ‘Mama!’ Then ‘Papa!’ ”
Feldman smiled ruefully and shook his head, attempting to dislodge the uncomfortable, long-buried emotions his dream had resurrected. “My mother was Catholic and my father Jewish,” he explained. “They each wanted me raised in their own faith and it used to create a lot of tension between them. I was reliving an episode, I guess.”
“So how did your parents resolve their conflict?” Anke asked, sitting next to him on the side of the bed.
“They didn't,” Feldman answered. “They divorced when I was nine.”
“You were an only child?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been terribly hard on you.”
He stared out the window toward the divided moon. “For years I felt totally responsible. My legacy, from being the offspring of the two most guilt-inducing religions on earth.”
“So what faith did you end up?”
“Neither. I finally gave up both religions and went independent. Agnostic, actually. But I wonder what triggered these memories tonight. It's the first time I've thought about this in a decade.” And the first time, he realized, that he'd ever discussed this issue anywhere other than on his psychiatrist's couch during his difficult adolescence.
“I bad troubled dreams, too,” Anke whispered, tenderly smoothing Feldman's hair as he had done for her hours earlier. “With what we went through last night, it's any wonder we slept at all.”
Feldman sat up, more awake now, but still very tired. Anke's warm, lithe presence close to him in her slight gown was distracting. He fought for a gentlemanly comment to counter his thoughts. “I'm … I'm sorry I woke you.”
“Not at all,” she said in a way that convinced him she meant it. She stood. “It's about time to get up anyway. Why don't you go ahead and shower. I've laid out some clean towels for you, and I'll fix you some breakfast.”
Feldman agreed, threw baek his covers and rose, only to realize that all his clothes were in a pile on the floor. He promptly retrieved the sheets, embarrassed once more in front of this disorienting woman.
Anke turned to go as if nothing had happened. But he heard that sweet, soft laugh of hers as she descended the stairwell.
He sighed. She always seemed to catch him in an awkward moment.
It was growing lighter outside when, after a rejuvenating shower, he sat down in his same wrinkled clothes to a superb breakfast of ham and eggs.
She sat across from him with some toast and juice and poured him more coffee. “So what do you really think happened last night, Jon?”
“You tell me.” He avoided answering her, wanting to shrug off this topic right now. Ever since he'd abandoned religion in his youth, blaming it for his parents’ divorce, he'd felt an emptiness inside him. A hole in his soul. Assuming he had a soul. Consequently, he found it difficult to confront the underlying question of what might or might not have occurred the previous evening.
Anke leaned back in her chair and deliberated for a moment. “Well,” she ventured, “I honestly don't know what I think right now. But what if God—that is, if you believe in God—really is communicating something to us?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, there's just too much coincidence to what happened last night for it all to be simply a natural occurrence, wouldn't you agree? Whether I like it or not, that's a very real possibility. What if, after all these centuries of silence, God is finally talking to us again? Maybe there's a message in this. Or the beginnings of a message. Maybe last night was a wake-up call.”
“So, God was just clearing His throat?” Feldman needed to lighten this up, but not yet knowing Anke's sensibilities, he feared he might have come across as sacrilegious.
She wasn't offended, she smiled. “Maybe. All I know is that I've never been so scared in my life. And I can't simply disregard what happened. Can you?”
Feldman surrendered to his real feelings. “Hell, I'm not sure what to think, Anke. For a while there, I thought maybe all those millenarians, whom I'd always considered idiots, might end up being right after all. Meaning that I, this lost, ignorant soul, would be doomed to eternal damnation for having no religious underpinnings.”
He suddenly understood the roots of his nightmare, and the realization hit him full force. Never before had he attached any relevance to his dreams. Finding a significance now presented an overtone that disturbed him.
Anke screwed up her face. “I don't know that I'd go so far as to accept any of those millenarian theologies,” she said. “But you can't just dismiss last night out of hand, can you?”
“Maybe not,” he replied slowly, still somewhat distracted by his new awareness, “but I find it hard to believe that any intelligent deity would mark His return by terrorizing His public. I guess I'll do as Bollinger suggested. I'll just wait and see how it all looks in the light of day.”
His wait was over. The dawn was breaking. Feldman glanced at his watch and realized that, with the streets in such poor shape, he might be hard pressed to drop by his apartment for a change of clothes.
Anke was already on her feet. “I understand you'll be leaving Israel soon, permanently?”
Feldman shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, I'm afraid so. This was just a temporary assignment with WNN. I've got a new job waiting for me back in the States.” As he stared into her eyes, his promising new position was losing some of its allure.
She nodded, a fleeting look of disappointment showing on her face. “Well, Mr. Feldman”—she smiled again—”this was one New Year's Eve I don't suppose we'll soon forget!”
Feldman rose and walked toward her. This time he wasn't thwarted in his designs. The kiss was long, and long overdue. He felt the earth moving again. And left feeling more reinvigorated than his hour and a half of sleep warranted.
Driving was tedious, hampered by toppled walls, fallen utility poles and electrical lines. He stopped briefly at his apartment for fresh clothes. There was no newspaper on his porch. He opened his door and noted with dismay his slovenly, unkempt quarters, which compared poorly with Anke's tidy, well-appointed town home. He shrugged and made a firm commitment to purge the place at the earliest opportunity.
Peeling off his shirt, he tossed it near a laundry basket in the corner and pulled on a fresh shirt from a pile of clean clothes near his bed. As he picked up his shoulder bag, his cellular phone rang. It was Hunter. Bad reception, but no disguising the excitement in his voice.
“Goddamn, I've been trying to get through to you for an hour!”
“Well, my phone's been open,” Feldman confirmed. “The cells in the area are probably overloaded.”
“Listen carefully in case I lose you,” Hunter said, panting. “This is incredible! One of the WNN Cairo teams came in early this morning and we all drove down to Bethlehem. You got to get down here right now! We missed it, pal!”
“Bethlehem? What's going on in Bethlehem?”
“This is where the epicenter of the quake was. The same place where we saw the lightning storm hit last night. There's some really weird shit going on down here and I'll tell you all about it, but get here quick before we lose this scoop.”
“Okay, okay, but what about Bollinger and our meeting?”
“I couldn't get through to him. Tell him we got him one hell of a follow-up story to last night. Get everybody and everything down here,
now!
There's a second mobile unit on its way from Cairo that should be at headquarters soon. We'll need it, too. When you get down here, look for a WNN RV with a satellite dish parked near David's Wall in the open area between King David and Manger streets on the north side. If we're lucky, we'll be the only media operation here. Bye!” Hunter was gone.
God, does this guy never sleep?
Feldman thought as he phoned Bollinger from his car. But the circuits were hopelessly tied up. Slowly wending his way through Jerusalem, the reporter was surprised to see so many buildings with severe damage. The darkness had certainly masked the destruction. Passing by the Old City, he could see major cracks showing in the walled-up entranceway of the ancient, sacred Golden Gate. Shaking his head at the destruction, he turned off on a south highway and impatiently made his way out of the city.
Bethlehem was ordinarily a very short drive from Jerusalem, virtually in the suburbs, only about ten kilometers south. But in the aftermath of the earthquake, the trip today was prolonged. Feldman had ample time to work the redial button of his cellular phone. Finally, he got through to Cissy.
“Where are you?” she wanted to know. “We've been trying to reach you all morning!”
“I'm on my way to Bethlehem,” he told her.
“Where? Have you heard from Hunter?”
“Yeah, he's in Bethlehem now.”
“What the hell's he doing there? Jimmy said he took off with one of the new Cairo mobile unit teams early this morning. He's got my car and he was supposed to pick me up for the meeting, the bastard!”
Feldman heard Cissy talking off-phone with someone and Bollinger jumped on the line. “Jon, what's going on?”
“Arnie, Hunter called me a while ago from Bethlehem. He's down there with one of the teams from Cairo. He wants the entire crew and equipment down there right now. Says we've got the chance for a real scoop if we hurry.”
“What's the story?”
“He didn't have time to give me details, but he said Bethlehem was the center of last night's quake and that thunderstorm. He said there's some really weird shit going on down there.”
That seemed to have Bollinger's attention, but he sounded irritated at the last-second fire drill. “This had better be good, Feldman,” he warned. “I'd like a little more detail to go on than ‘some really weird shit’ before we all just haul ass out of here in the middle of a story.”
“That's all I know, Arnie, but he was pretty insistent.”
Bollinger signed off, still grumbling. Feldman switched on the car radio. Finally, Israel Radio was back on the air. Feldman had to wait for the English version before he heard more appalling news of the night before. The widespread, global panic. The violence, the destruction, the death. This only reinforced in his mind his earlier argument to Anke.
Underscoring Hunter's claim, Israel Radio also confirmed Bethlehem as the epicenter of a major earthquake measuring seven point one on the Richter scale. With the exception of a mild tremor reported in Rome, apparently none of the other millenarian stronghold cities around the world had suffered like disasters.
Bethlehem, Israel 9:33
A.M
., Saturday, January 1, 2000
A
rriving in Bethlehem from the north, Feldman overlooked a picturesque hillside town of about twenty thousand inhabitants, primarily Christian Arabs whose families had lived here for hundreds of years. Other than in the ethnic origin of its residents, Bethlehem had changed little since the birth of Christ. From rolling, sparse pasturelands that surrounded the town, shepherds still drove flocks of sheep and goats along worn, narrow, cobblestone alleyways into the central marketplace bazaar. Side by side with ancient, historic structures, newer construction had been randomly squeezed in over the centuries. But built of the same indigenous stone, most were hardly distinguishable from their predecessors.
Interspersed among this maze of densely packed dwellings were the elegant white-sandstone spires of a dozen churches. Including the center-most focus of the town, the fourteen-hundred-year-old Church of the Nativity, located in Manger Square over the grotto that Stephen Martyr had identified in
A.D.
155 as the precise spot where Christ was born.
Feldman was amazed there was no visible damage from the previous night's violent quake. Instead of a disaster zone, he found the town swarming with millenarians. Shops and cafés were bustling and there were no signs of interrupted municipal services. No cordoned-off areas for utility repairs, no emergency crews digging through rubble.
The crowds were densest not near revered Manger Square in the center of town, as Feldman had anticipated, but at a large, parklike common on the north side. The common was encircled by connecting loops of Sderot King David on the north and Sderot Manger on the south—
sderot
being the Hebrew word for “street.” Near where the two loops of the boulevards met, Feldman spotted the WNN RV, parked behind a row of stucco buildings.
He knocked at the door, a bolt unlocked, and he was greeted by an unfamiliar, bookish-looking, middle-aged man in a tie and horn-rimmed glasses who, conversely, recognized him instantly.
“Mr. Feldman, we've been expecting you.”
Feldman was still not used to his newly acquired celebrity status.