The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 13

Sam Morgan was still feeling the annoyance and frustration as he sat in the taxi to Jerusalem. The immigration staff at Ben Gurion Airport in Lod, Israel had been particularly obnoxious in the way they questioned him — treating him almost as if he were a criminal. At one point he was worried that they were going to get his suitcase from baggage and search it. That thought alone frightened the hell out of him. It would have been disastrous if they had found the parchment scroll.

How would he explain it to HaTzadik?

At some point he noticed that other passengers were getting similarly harsh treatment and some were even being escorted — or rather dragged — away from the area and not being allowed to enter the country.

It was only in the baggage area, when he asked another passenger about the incident, that it was explained to him that some protestors were trying to “infiltrate” the country to stage protests with Palestinian and “left wing” groups. With that reassurance, he had no qualms about scooping up his bag when it came round the carousel and marching confidently through the Green Channel at Customs.

But he was still fuming. Just because a few protestors were trying to enter the country was no reason to treat all foreign visitors as if they were criminals. Worse still, he couldn’t escape the feeling that it was only the non-Jewish passengers who were being subjected to the third degree.

He felt like talking about it to the taxi driver, but feared that this would merely flag him up as another “trouble maker.” So instead he sat in stony silence and soaked up the view of the buildings of the coastal plain, the fields and then finally the mountain road as it snaked its way upward towards Jerusalem.

It seemed like barely an hour after he left the airport, that he arrived at the David’s Citadel Hotel, a modern, luxury hotel adjacent to the newly developed Mamilla District. He head read about this area before he came — all part of his tendency to over-research and check things out. Looking around his environs now, he would not have been able to guess that the area had degenerated into a slum in the fifties and sixties, when it sat on the border of the no-man’s-land that separated Israel from Jordanian-occupied eastern Jerusalem.

It had taken twenty years after the liberation of eastern Jerusalem — and much bureaucratic wrangling and horse-trading — for this formerly run-down area to be torn down and completely rebuilt from the ground up. It was now a bustling mixed residential-commercial complex of apartments, hotels and shops with facades of light-coloured Jerusalem stone.

After checking in and ordering a light snack from room service, Morgan phoned Shalom Tikva.

“I’m here.”

“Where?”

“The Hotel. David’s Citadel.”

“You were supposed to phone me from the airport.”

“I forgot.”

“Have you got it?”

“Of course.”

“Well bring it round!”

The line went dead. That was HaTzadik,” Morgan thought, always brisk, brusque and to the point. He hadn’t served in the Israeli army for politico-religious reasons. But in some way he would have made a great soldier.

An hour later, after an energy-reviving snack and a shower, Sam Morgan was walking through the streets of Mea She’arim. The name Mea She’arim means “a hundred gates” and the neighbourhood — located in West Jerusalem but close to the Old City — was an old neighbourhood of narrow streets and linked houses with weathered facades of Jerusalem stone and first floor balconies supported by protruding rusted iron I-beams. At ground level, many of the windows were protected by white-painted wrought iron bars somewhat more ornate than the fencing on the balconies, that was in many cases chipped and peeled, revealing the rusted iron beneath.

Many of the outside walls were adorned with posters in Hebrew — plain black on white — announcing deaths, marriages and rabbinical proclamations. Morgan knew this only from what he had been told: he didn’t understand the Hebrew. But he did understand the one or two posters in English that warned — in dire tones and language — not to dress immodestly. These were specifically addressed to women and phrased in mildly threatening language to make clear to any woman who might show too much leg or arm that the same flesh that would arouse lust in normal red-blooded men would only arouse anger in this pious community.

Mea She’arim was the home to a number of ultra-orthodox — “haredi” — sects. Many of these were Hassidic and were openly against the very existence of the State of Israel, notably Satmar, Breslov, Shomer Emunim and the extremist Mishkenot Ha’ro’im. But the most fanatical of all in its hostility to the Jewish state was not a Hassadic sect but a religious order of Lithuanian Jewish origin called Shomrei Ha’ir — the Guardians of the City.

It was the leader of this sect, Shalom Tikva — AKA HaTzadik (literally “the righteous one”) whom Sam Morgan was on his way to see.

It took several wrong-turns and requests for directions before Morgan arrived at the correct address. He had to knock on the door, because it had no bell, and when he was ushered in by the aging white-haired, white-bearded owner, he looked around to see a house that had no radio and no television. These were considered instruments of sin, or at least temptation, by the ultra-orthodox.

“Did you bring it?” asked HaTzadik, as he led Morgan into the carpeted living room. This was a stupid question, Morgan thought. But it was wholly consistent with Shalom Tikva’s well-known impatience. In any case, living room was a bit of a misnomer. For the room was essentially a library, except for one small dining table at one end, near the kitchen. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with richly-bound books. Morgan suspected that many of these were volumes of that monumental treatise: the Babylonian Talmud.

He suspected, however, that there must be other books as well. But they were clearly all religious books. HaTzadik had told him once about other Jewish religious works such as the six books of the Mishne, the Arba’ah Turim, the Shulhan Aruch and the Zohar, a 1700 page Jewish mystical treatise from which the Kabbala is derived.

The impatient look on Shalom Tikva’s face snapped Morgan out of his state of awe. He unzipped the carry-on bag and handed over the cardboard tube containing the parchment scroll to the bearded man. For a minute Shalom Tikva’s eyes gleamed, but then calm returned, as if he felt that he dare not celebrate until he was sure.

He took the tube over to a large table in one corner of the room, switched on the desk lamp and prized the cap off the tube. Then he carefully extracted the parchment and opened slowly, almost with reverence, on the desk. There was a corner missing, the edges frayed around it, as if some one had torn it off roughly. But he ignored this. Instead, he studied the manuscript carefully, peering long and hard at the script, struggling to make out what it said. When he finally did, his face hardened into a scowl.