Devil's Island Read online

  “If the war continues at this rate,” Abraham said, “no one will be left alive to enjoy the peace that follows—whichever side eventually prevails.” He supposed a miracle was possible, but the rebel factions were vastly outnumbered, poorly organized, and prone to fighting among themselves.

  “I guess we wouldn’t have gotten far outside the wall today, anyway,” Tobias said. “See how closely the camp is guarded.” He pointed toward the tents of the Tenth Legion, a few hundred yards in the distance. A Roman sentry was posted about every ten feet around the southern perimeter, the part of the camp visible from their vantage point.

  “We’d better head back.” Abraham put a hand on Tobias’s shoulder and urged him to turn around.

  Tobias did not move. “They’re well fed, the soldiers. The perimeter is guarded, but if we could just slip past the sentries, the camp would be virtually empty.” He spoke as if picturing every step of an imaginary assault on the camp. “We could find the mess tent easily enough. It’s probably that large one about a third of the way in. They would never miss whatever we could carry out—”

  “You can’t be serious! There is no way we could make it through all those guards undetected.”

  “I have a wife and child who are going to die soon if I don’t bring them something to eat.” Tobias had a wild look in his eyes that alarmed Abraham. “And there is food in that camp.”

  “Tobias—”

  “I know,” he said bitterly. “There’s no way to get to it.” He turned and sighed. “We’d be killed, and then my family would starve for certain.”

  “Perhaps we can find another abandoned house with a bit of food hidden away,” Abraham said. “That’s how God blessed us with the corn.”

  They walked the short distance back through the aqueduct and Abraham gave Tobias a hand as they climbed out over the dirt and rubble to the street. As soon as they got their footing on level ground, a group of Zealots rounded the corner and headed their way.

  “Have you been outside the walls?” one of them demanded.

  “See if they have food,” commanded another.

  Abraham and Tobias exchanged a brief glance, wondering what to do. The two were unarmed and they had no food, but that didn’t mean the half-dozen ragtag soldiers would let them go.

  “Run for it,” Tobias urged.

  Abraham tore down the street as fast as his legs would carry him, with Tobias pounding the pavement right behind him. The Zealots were in hot pursuit, daggers drawn, shouting, “Stop! Traitors!”

  His leg muscles burning with the uncommon exertion, Abraham turned onto a street he recognized and jerked his head backward, still running at full speed. The soldiers were gaining on them.

  “Left!” Tobias shouted, his arms flailing wildly as his short legs tried to match Abraham’s frantic pace.

  Abraham turned left into the alley Tobias had indicated, and a few yards ahead he saw a street. He couldn’t consult Tobias about their route, so he darted in that direction. The footsteps behind him were not quite as thunderous, and Abraham thought that he and Tobias might be able to outrun the rebels. Instinctively, he darted into first one alley and then another one, his feet seeming to know where to carry him.

  He concentrated so hard on finding landmarks that it took him a few moments to notice the footsteps had not followed him after his last turn. Slowing enough to brave a glance backward, he discovered he was alone on the street. Tobias! What happened to Tobias? He was right behind me.

  Abraham heard shouts and the sound of running from the next street over, so he changed direction and followed the noise. But the narrow streets and alleys were like a maze, and no matter how hard he tried or how fast he ran, he could not manage to find Tobias and his pursuers. After a few minutes he could no longer hear them at all, and he slumped against a stone wall, his heart pounding and his chest heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows. Sweat dripped off his face and stained his clothes.

  Perhaps Tobias eluded them, he thought. Tobias knew the Lower City well and might have spotted a hiding place, a narrow passageway he could squeeze into while the soldiers ran past him, unaware. Or perhaps he was talking his way out of the situation this very moment, if they had caught up with him. Tobias was stubborn and feisty and quite persuasive.

  He was being optimistic, he knew, but Abraham did not want to consider the other possibilities. After catching his breath, he began to try to find his way home. For more than an hour Abraham wandered, turning down one blind alley after another and then backtracking. He never fully recognized where he was, but he finally reached a street he knew would take him back to the Upper City.

  Walking into the late afternoon sun, he shielded his eyes with his hand, and as he climbed the hill, he prayed he would find Tobias at home with Rivka, entertaining her with a highly colorful but carefully edited version of their adventure.

  Tobias was not at home, however.

  “I got lost,” Abraham told Rivka. “I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention and I, uh, got separated from Tobias. It took me a long time to find my way back.” That much was true, but he left out the part about being chased by a pack of Zealots at the time they’d been separated. Rivka’s eyes widened in fear. “But Tobias wouldn’t get lost, so why isn’t he here by now?”

  “Perhaps he’s still searching for food.” Abraham averted his head to avoid looking at Rivka as he spoke. “We hadn’t found anything yet when I got lost,” he explained.

  The baby cried weakly in her arms, and Rivka tried to soothe him with a soft “Shhh, shhh, shhh.”

  They sat in the courtyard until nightfall settled around them like a close dark shroud. Rivka tried to comfort her hungry infant as she watched the door anxiously, while Abraham prayed silently and tried valiantly to console her.

  His mind explored dozens of possible scenarios, trying not to think about the brutally murdered man in the streets and trying not to imagine what the soldiers might have done to Tobias when they caught him. The one thing he was sure of was that Tobias had not outrun them; if he had, he would certainly have made it home.

  He would start searching for Tobias at dawn, Abraham decided.

  7

  THE NEXT MORNING ABRAHAM RETURNED to the Lower City and attempted to retrace his steps, searching for any sign of Tobias. He had not slept well, tossing and turning all night. Once, when he had dozed off for a few minutes, he dreamed of tripping over Tobias’s mutilated body in the street. He woke up vowing he would not let that happen to his cousin. If Tobias had been killed, he would find his body and give him a proper burial.

  Abraham combed the streets but did not find a body. He looked up and down the alleys for a fresh bloodstain, a lone sandal, a torn bit of cloth—he remembered Tobias had been wearing a faded blue tunic—but he found no clues, no evidence that Tobias might have been beaten or killed. He went all the way back to the opening of the aqueduct, finding the place where he’d last seen his cousin racing behind him. But there was no sign of what had happened to Tobias.

  Of course, the revolutionaries could have killed him and dumped his body in a deserted building. But Abraham focused on another alternative: perhaps Tobias had been forced to join the revolutionaries to fight for the city. He would never have joined their army willingly, but if captured, Abraham thought, Tobias would do it to spare his life, in the hopes he could eventually escape and be reunited with Rivka and Joel. Abraham gradually accepted the fact that he might never know what had happened to Tobias, but he chose to believe his cousin was still alive, and that’s the scenario he painted for Rivka when he returned that evening.

  Over the next few days he scoured the city for food. The most successful strategy, he had discovered, was to look for abandoned houses that appeared to have been ransacked. He would sneak inside to see if the thieves, most likely the rebel forces, had left anything behind in their haste. No morsel of bread was too moldy for him; he treasured every crumb. Occasionally he found a few kernels of wheat. Even if they’d been crushed, he gat
hered them to take to Rivka and the baby, who were both slowly starving.

  One day he mistakenly entered a home that was still occupied, and the owner, near death, protested feebly and incoherently. Abraham mumbled that he had the wrong house and scrambled back into the street, cringing at the realization that he had stooped to burglary. But he was not a common thief, he told himself; he would not steal food from anyone living.

  The dead were another matter. He entered another house where bodies had been stacked against the walls like firewood. Desperate, he held one hand over his nose to stifle the odor while he searched the makeshift mausoleum. He was rewarded for his efforts with a handful of barley.

  Every day he brought his collection back to Rivka, offering the meager provisions to her and the baby. She always insisted he take a few bites for himself.

  “What will happen to us if you starve to death?” she asked. “You must eat something too, Abraham.”

  Little Joel’s cries were growing weaker and more infrequent, and Abraham realized that Rivka was no longer able to nurse her baby. Her milk had failed as her body struggled to sustain itself, and she tried to keep Joel alive on water and tiny spoonfuls of gruel she made from a few grains of boiled wheat. The child was frightfully thin, yet his stomach was swollen and distended.

  Rivka’s once-beautiful olive skin was now sallow and stretched taut over hollow cheeks, and her dark eyes appeared sunken and listless. She became animated only when talking about what life had been like before the war, which she and Abraham sometimes did to keep their minds from dwelling on their desperation. She brought Jerusalem to life for him—Jerusalem the way it had been in its glory, not the war- and famine-ravaged city he experienced every day. They also talked of their spiritual journeys, and how they had each come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth.

  Every evening, even in the midst of starvation, they gave thanks for their few bites of food—if they had any. They prayed for Tobias and for their deliverance from the iron yoke of the Roman Empire. Abraham often wondered if God heard their prayers or if He had turned a deaf ear to the Holy City and all its inhabitants.

  On one of the nights they’d had nothing to eat, Abraham couldn’t sleep. His stomach twisted in pain, and his legs cramped. He was walking farther each day with fewer results, and it was taking a toll on his body. Weary of lying in bed and willing sleep to come—without success—Abraham got up and went to the courtyard.

  It was a clear, mild night, pleasant after yet another endless, fruitless, oppressively hot day. He stretched out on a stone bench, his hands clasped behind his head, and looked up at the canopy of stars. The heavenly bodies twinkled like diamonds against a black velvet canopy. They were untouched by the fighting, the bloodshed, the hunger, and the mind-bending terror.

  The words of a psalm came to his mind:

  When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

  The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

  What is man that You are mindful of him,

  And the son of man that You visit him?

  Are You really mindful of man? Abraham wondered. Do You even know who I am—where I am right now? Do You hear the cries of a starving infant?

  A slight breeze blew across his face, and it seemed to stir something in his heart. He heard no voice, felt no hand on his shoulder; nevertheless he sat up suddenly, feeling compelled to follow some unseen presence that beckoned him.

  He slipped quietly out of the house and stood on the street in front of the main door. The full moon cast a pale light on the cobblestones, and the eerie stillness of midnight welcomed him. Which way? he wondered, and instantly he knew. He walked about a hundred feet and when he came to a cross street, he again knew which way to turn. At the next intersection he paused, and a bony hand reached out and clutched his arm.

  “What—?” Abraham sputtered and spun around, startled by the sudden appearance of an elderly servant woman on the street.

  She said nothing, but her steel-gray eyes urged him to follow. She took a few steps and then turned and looked back at him, silently entreating him. For reasons he could not have explained, Abraham felt no threat from her, so he followed.

  The frail, stooped woman led him into an alley and then opened a door into the courtyard of a sizable home. Leaves skittered across the tiled floor as they walked toward a stairway. She paused at a table by the doorway and motioned for Abraham to pick up a small lamp that was burning there. He looked at the clay saucer for a moment and wondered if he was dreaming. Rivka had quit lighting the lamps months ago, to extend their supply of olive oil. He passed his hand over the wick and felt the warmth of the flame. This was no dream.

  Abraham followed the woman down the stairs into the cellar. The home had been plundered, and they had to step over broken shards of pottery scattered all over the floor. He spied some trampled kernels of wheat and instinctively bent to pick them up, but she stopped him, taking his arm and leading him to the corner. Smiling, she pointed to several items the looters had missed: two clay jars filled with olive oil, a small sack of flour, and a plentiful supply of unground wheat. Actually, it was no more than a wealthy family would consume in a day or two, but it was more grain than Abraham had seen in one place in many weeks.

  Excited, he turned to start asking the questions tumbling through his head: How had she found this place? Did she live here? Work here? Why did she want to share this bounty with him?

  The old woman was gone.

  He held the lamp high and searched the shadows of the dark cellar. Her shawl was on the floor beside him, right where she had stood, but the woman was no longer there.

  Using the discarded shawl as a knapsack, he bundled up the wheat and the flour. Then he tucked the jars of olive oil under his arm, picked up the lamp, and walked noisily over the debris and up the stairs. He glanced around the courtyard, but the woman was not there, either. The door to the alley was ajar. Had they closed it when they entered? He couldn’t remember.

  For a moment Abraham thought about searching the rest of the house, but he somehow knew he would not find her. He was not even sure now whether the woman had been real or an apparition. But the supplies he was carrying were real, and he rejoiced over them.

  There was no need for the lamp in the bright moonlight, so he blew it out. But he took it with him as he left the house; the oil it still held was valuable.

  Humbled and heartened, Abraham was near tears as he traveled the few blocks back to Rivka’s house. What is man that You are mindful of him? he quoted silently. And the son of man that You visit him?

  The stars shone brilliantly in the heavens as the truth sank into Abraham’s consciousness: he had been visited. God knew who he was, and where he was. And He had heard their prayers.

  Rivka rationed the olive oil, using a small amount to make griddle cakes with the flour. Every day she swallowed a spoonful of the oil and fed Joel as much as he would take. She crushed the wheat and boiled it into porridge. Abraham ate a daily portion of the porridge, but he would not touch the olive oil; in his mind, the oil was for Rivka. He remembered the widow of Zarephath, whose one jar of oil miraculously was not depleted during a long drought because she had fed the prophet Elijah, and he prayed God would do the same for Rivka.

  Eventually, however, the oil ran out, and their spirits with it. The baby no longer cried, and Rivka became lethargic, sitting for hours on end with Joel pressed to her chest, her mouth forming words but making no sound. Abraham thought she was praying, but when he spoke to her, she looked at him blankly and did not answer his questions.

  One day toward the end of July, Abraham left the house to wander the city, half-dazed. For the last few days he’d had only a few kernels of wheat. He ate them raw because they seemed to last longer. They were crunchy—like seeds or nuts, he told himself.

  The specter of starvation hung over the city; he saw it everywhere he looked. Gaunt men gnawed shoe leather in their hunger; others made a meal of straw. When he saw a woman digging in
the dust of the street for a crumb, Abraham’s first impulse was to pity her and his second was to fight her for it. It was a fleeting thought and he resisted it, but he was no longer amazed that such desperation occurred to him.

  He walked the streets aimlessly and finally grasped the fact that he had meandered too close to the fighting when he found himself stepping over a body in the street. A large stone whistled by his head, then another. They came from a Roman catapult. The Temple Mount, straight ahead of him, seemed to be where the battle was raging. The rebels are making their last stand, he realized, fighting for their holiest shrine.

  Preoccupied, Abraham did not hear the sounds of an approaching party of revolutionaries until it was almost too late. He ducked into a narrow crevice between two stone buildings. It was a tiny space in the tightly packed quarter of the city, a space he could never have squeezed into when he first arrived in Jerusalem. If I lose any more weight, he thought with an untimely touch of amusement, maybe I’ll become completely invisible.

  He had definitely not achieved invisibility yet. One of the soldiers had seen him and now reached into his hiding place and grabbed a handful of Abraham’s tunic, bringing his face halfway out of the shadows.

  Tobias! Abraham’s mouth fell open, but he caught himself before he spoke the name aloud.

  “Rivka? The baby?” Tobias asked in a hoarse, anguished whisper. His eyelids were purple and heavy, and his face was lined with exhaustion. “Alive, but barely.”

  “What have you found?” one of the soldiers shouted in their direction.

  “Nothing!” Tobias shoved Abraham roughly against the stone wall. “This one has no food, and he’s too weak to fight.”

  Abraham crumpled to the ground. Blood trickled down his face from a gash in his scalp. He looked up at Tobias and nodded almost imperceptibly when he saw the unspoken apology in his cousin’s eyes.