The Last Testament

CHAPTER SEVEN

B EITIN , THE W EST B ANK , T UESDAY , 9.32 AM

He wouldn’t need to be here long. Just ten minutes in the office, collect the papers and leave.

Except ‘office’ was not quite the right word. The two heavy padlocks guarding the metal door testified to that. ‘Workroom’ was more like it, even ‘storehouse’. Inside, it smelled like a potting shed. The fluorescent strip lights flickered on to reveal shelves filled not with papers, files or computer discs but stiff cardboard boxes. And inside those were fragments of ancient pottery, material Ahmed Nour had excavated from this very village.

He worked this way on every dig. Set up a base as close to the site as possible, allowing the latest findings to be brought back, catalogued and stored right away. He liked to do the job daily if he could: leave even a few burnt pottery shards around for too long and they would soon vanish. Looters, the curse of archaeologists the world over.

Ahmed found his desk: modest, metal, as if it belonged to the foreman on a construction site. Not so far off, he thought to himself. We’re both in the business of human homes: they build new ones, I dig up old ones.

The papers he needed for his meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority’s Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage were right there, in a neat pile. Sweet Huda, he thought to himself. His young protégée had left everything in order: the permit renewal form, seeking permission to carry on digging in Beitin, and the application for a grant, begging for the cash to do it. Huda took care of all contact with the outside world now. She left him alone with no distractions-no phone calls, no emails, no blaring radio or crackling TV-so that he could bury himself in his work. If he concentrated hard, he could shut out modernity altogether.

That’s what he had done this weekend. And he would have carried on doing it all week if it hadn’t been for this damned meeting. The head of antiquities was an ignoramus. With no archaeological training, he was little more than a political hack. He wore a beard, which meant that the politics in question were of the new variety: religious.

‘My preference, Dr Nour,’ he had explained to Ahmed in their first meeting, ‘is for the glorification of our Islamic heritage.’ No surprise there. The new government was half Hamas. Translation: I’ll pay for anything after the seventh century; if you want to dig up anything older, you’re on your own.

The irony of it was not lost on Ahmed. Once he had been a hero to the Palestinian political class. He had been a founder member of a group of scholars who, decades ago, had insisted on looking at the ground beneath their feet in a radically new way. Until then, ever since the expeditions of Edward Robinson in the nineteenth century, those taking a shovel to this landscape were looking for one thing only: the Bible. They weren’t interested in Palestine or the people who had lived here for thousands of years. They were searching for the Holy Land.

They were outsiders, of course, Americans or Europeans. They would arrive at Jaffa or Jerusalem giddy with scripture, yearning to see the route Abraham trod, to gaze at the Tomb of Christ. They longed to find the vestiges of the ancient Israelites or of the early Christians. Palestinians, ancient and modern, were an irrelevance.

The new generation, Ahmed among them, was trained in biblical archaeology-what other kind was there?-but they soon developed their own ideas. In the 1960s, several of them assisted a team of Lutheran Bible scholars from Illinois as they excavated Tell Ta’anach, a mound not far from Jenin in the West Bank. The Americans dug there for several years, such was their excitement. Ta’anach was mentioned in the Bible as one of the Canaanite cities conquered by Joshua, military leader of the Israelites.

But Ahmed and his colleagues began to see something else. They returned to the site, their focus now not Biblical Ta’anach but the Palestinian village at the foot of the mound: Ti’innik. These new archaeologists wanted to learn all they could about day-to-day life in this ordinary community, which had sat on the same spot for most of the last five millennia. Every heave of the archaeologist’s shovel, every push of a spade, was making a political statement: this would be a Palestinian excavation of Palestine.

That put Ahmed Nour firmly into the bosom of the burgeoning Palestinian national movement. In whispers he was told that the Palestine Liberation Organization, then still secret, banned and run from abroad, approved of his work. He was nurturing ‘national pride’ and handily proving, at a time when most Israeli leaders were still denying even the existence of a Palestinian people, that the communities of these lands had the deepest possible roots.

His reputation only increased when he led students on a dig at an abandoned refugee camp, digging up the trash, the old sardine cans and plastic bags which revealed the way of life of people just a generation gone, those who had fled their homes in 1948. And his work here at Beitin had boosted his reputation yet further.

Previous scholars had thrilled at this place as the Bet-El of the Bible, the spot where Abraham, heading south, stopped and built an altar, the place where Jacob rested his head on a pillow of stone and dreamed of the angels going up and down a ladder. But Ahmed was determined to examine not just the ruins around Beitin, but the village itself. For humble, tiny Beitin had been ruled by Hellenists, by Romans, by Byzantines, by Ottomans. It had been Christian and it had been Muslim: in the late nineteenth century, a mosque had been built on the ruins of a Byzantine church. You could still see the remains of a Hellenistic tower, a Byzantine monastery and a Crusader castle. All three. To Ahmed’s mind, that was the glory of Palestine. Even in a forgotten speck like Beitin, you could see the history of the world, one layer on top of another.

That gave him an idea. He reached for one of the newer boxes, one that would contain the freshest finds from the site. He peered inside, his nose crinkling at the musty smell: human skulls from the early Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago, along with storage jars and cooking pots. He smiled, knowing he could do better, that he could go back even further. He unlocked a cupboard, to find the flint tools and animal bones that had first been found at Beitin in the 1950s and which had been traced back some five millennia before Christ. He would tell that oaf at the antiquities department about the traces of blood that had been spotted, a sure sign of ritual sacrifice, establishing that Beitin had once been the site of a Canaanite temple. Maybe it was playing the old biblical game, thought Ahmed with a pang of guilt, but he had to use whatever he’d got.

It still might have no effect. The man from Hamas would doubtless perk up at the reference to the nineteenth-century mosque and yawn at the rest. Or perhaps there was a chance he would see Beitin for what it really was, a place packed with the history of this land.

On tiptoes, stretching to put the most precious box back on the top shelf of the locked cupboard, he heard a noise. Metallic.

‘Hello? Huda?’

No reply. Probably nothing. He must have left the metal door to the workroom ajar and the wind had clicked it shut. No matter. He would seal this box and be on his way.

But then there was another sound. This time a footstep, unmistakable. Ahmed turned around to see two men coming towards him. Both were wearing black hoods which covered their faces entirely. The taller man was holding up a finger, which he theatrically placed over his lips. Hush.

‘What? What is this?’ said Ahmed, his knees buckling.

‘Just come with us,’ said the tall man, something strange in his accent. ‘Now!’ And for the first time Ahmed saw the gun, lifted and aimed straight at him.