Mahmoud drilled the last hole in the wall of the future kitchen, then inserted the screw anchors into all of them. He sighed and climbed down the ladder. Two more hours until the lunch break. For now, he could have a coffee and cigarette, while Shuki and Yaakov were hanging the kitchen units. He was getting too old to be climbing up and down all day. His knees hurt, and his back creaked. His eyes were not as sharp as they used to be, and his bladder was beginning to give him the trouble of old men. Yet, he could not admit it even to himself, because who would feed the family, if he couldn’t? He knew that day would come eventually, sooner rather than later, and if the Jews were looking forward to their retirement, grandchildren and travelling, he could only look forward to silent resentment of his daughters-in-law and the forced obedience of his sons. He was not a citizen of Israel, so no pension awaited him in his old age.
There wasn’t enough cardamom left, and the coffee tasted weak, pale, just like the face of that new boy Yaakov just hired, Shalom. What a funny name. Arabs named for war; Jews named for peace. Weaklings. He shrugged. This was the way of the world.
“Mahmoud! Where the devil are you?” – Yaakov yelled. They needed another man to support the units. Yet, Mahmoud did not reply. Just another minute of rest. He shook the ashes off his cigarette, staring fixedly at his dirty and scarred hand, and thinking that one day, the hands of his newborn grandson, Amir, would look like that, too, unless he could scrape up some more money and send him to university in Cairo. The boy should be a lawyer, he is so smart, always making arguments. He sighed again. “I’m coming!” – he yelled in the direction of the kitchen.
That was exactly when the building shook. Something crashed down in the kitchen, and breaking glass sang out a sad note right behind him. It was as if a giant took a deep breath in the mountain under them, stretching after centuries of sleep, and began chewing the sheer rock under the new building. It sounded like a whole escadrille of fighter jets flying overhead. Then the floor became soft. Marble tiles turned into the dunes by the coast near Ashdod, even though they were on a hill overlooking Jerusalem. The Jews in the kitchen yelled something out in Hebrew, and thundered down the unfinished stairs. Mahmoud made his way down, too, quaking with the most primitive and instinctual fear, the same one that makes animals find their way out of a burning forest, without a thought or a plan. Yet, at the bottom of the stairs, instead of turning to the exit, the light and air, he pushed his way past the bales of sand meant for the floors, into the basement, where the storage rooms were meant to be, and squatted down by the rock wall, not yet dressed in stone. The tiles prepared for the job were piled up haphazardly in three different places, and Yaakov just hasn’t found anyone to blame for that yet.
The giant under him yawned, and Mahmoud saw the vast mouth of the earth opening up to swallow him. Forgetting all the right prayers, he covered his eyes with his hands and waited to be crushed by the hundreds of tons of concrete towering over his head. Then, the grinding noise stopped, the floor was solid again. Mahmoud opened his eyes and thanked Allah for surviving. He was covered in mud and pieces of rock, scratched and bruised, but otherwise unharmed. His heart was still racing, and he got up shakily to go back upstairs, when he realized… There was a mouth of a cave staring at him, and inside it, piled one on top of another, there were three ancient-looking amphoras and five stone chests.
Outside, the sirens wailed. He heard the other workers yelling out his name and asking if he was OK. He realized he had two minutes at most, before the treasure was found and claimed for the State. Yet, this was his once in a lifetime chance – to stop slaving on building sites, to send Amir to university, to add another floor so his son Nasser could take a wife, at last… He looked around frantically. The amphoras were too big and heavy to hide, and he had no time to check what was inside them. He knew scrolls could fetch the most, but he couldn’t see any scrolls anywhere. On top of the stone chests, he noticed a small metal box. When he lifted it, he gasped at its weight – it fitted in the palm of his hand, but weighed at least as much as an adult-sized bike. It’s got to be something special and expensive, to be stored like that, in a lead container. He shoved it hastily into the pocket of his jeans, hoping it wouldn’t tear, and turned to leave the newly formed cave.
“Here you are, man!” – Yaakov clapped him on the shoulder. Then he breathed out an oath. “Look what we’ve got here! A treasure!” He stood there for a while, just staring in awe at the mysterious containers. Then he ran out to call Antiques Authority. Mahmoud followed him, “We mustn’t touch anything! I thought all building projects were approved by archeologists, but look at this here! Come on, you will be rewarded for finding this!” He rubbed his palms together, his corpulent belly swaying right and left with the move. Then he pulled up his jeans and adjusted his kippa. Mahmoud shivered with distaste, and turned to leave. He wanted to have a look at the thing he took – curiosity was gnawing at him. Yet, he couldn’t exactly take another break now, when they were all discussing the earthquake and the treasure. They finished hanging up the kitchen and installed the sink before a phone call came, ordering them to stop all works at once until further notice. The archeologist on duty was on his way.
They sat outside, smearing thick hot pita bread from the bakery with labane or hummous, still talking about the earthquake. Many old buildings had collapsed… they all knew someone who lived in those areas. Shalom, being the youngest, chopped up some vegetables, and Shuki brewed some more coffee. Mahmoud got up slowly and headed for the nearest bathroom. They all heard a blood-curdling long scream. Then silence set in.
By the time Yaakov finished breaking down the solid wooden door, there was nobody left to save. In the bloody mess on the floor they found some severed fingers, sliced off as if by a giant razor, and Mahmoud’s leg, cut off with geometric perfection. But the strangest thing of all was that the toilet bowl was sliced in two, as well, with the same uncanny precision. Yaakov had enough time to see that the floor was being sliced with something invisible, cleaving the wall on the floor below them into two neat halves, moving slowly and deliberately towards the belly of the earth. It was small, grey, and it smelled of something like burning vinegar, but the metallic smell of blood overpowered everything. Then he slammed the door, and vomited all over himself and his workers’ shoes, undigested pieces of pita mixing in with the stream of bright-red blood leaking out from under the door.
What he remembered later, when the TV and radio hosts wanted to speak to him, was just the freckled young face of the archeologist, with beads of sweat glistening on his forehead, screaming out one word: “Shamir! Shamir!” and talking some nonsense about the Temple and the Messiah and everything being real. “How did you just let it go?!” – he demanded. “You catch it, idiot. It just killed a man here.” – Shuki spat out at him then. The archeologist was pulling his hair out, wailing that not a soul would believe him about this. Yaakov refused to be interviewed, saying the event traumatized him too much, and they all clucked their tongues and said they were so sorry. Shuki delivered stories worthy of the “Thousand nights” to anyone who would listen, until the public lost interest. Shalom had simply disappeared – his bride wanted nothing to do with him, until he denied any connection to the event. Mahmoud’s family received a hefty compensation from the company, after signing the report that spoke of a concrete mixer knife being dislodged by the quake. The family built another floor in their concrete shell of a house, enough for two more sons to take wives. The archeologist was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown, and Yaakov made his wife cook extra shabbat meals, so the only man who understood what happened could recover and explain. Biblical scholars from all over the world made their way to him, yet he stubbornly refused to speak to anyone, until the memory of the event was scattered by the four winds of Jerusalem, carried into the Judean desert by the winter gales and burnt to a crisp by the heatwaves of the summer.
Yet, if you creep quietly into the back yard of the building set slightly back from Jeremiah Street in Jerusalem, and ask the neighbours about the treasure, they will confirm every word, and even show you the graves of Yaakov the Builder and the young archeologist, who never recovered his sanity, after you solemnly promise to never, ever share this story with anyone else.
