The 13th Tablet

As they arrived at the house described by Hassan, Mina turned to Jack.

‘By the way, you said to Muhad you’d be away for a week or two.’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you thinking of taking a vacation in Mosul?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘I received a call the other day and need to sort out a few things.’

‘I see. That’s a very Jack-like answer: to the point, yet utterly vague.’

She didn’t wait for a further explanation and knocked on the door. An old woman peered out shyly. Mina explained who she was, and after much smiling and comforting words, the old lady let them in. She turned out to be the labourer’s sister and after she had fetched him, they sat down for tea. Mina never failed to be moved by Middle Eastern hospitality. In this poverty-stricken home, where brothers, sisters, cousins and grand parents all lived in two small rooms separated by a curtain, they still offered tea to visitors.

‘You work for the university?’ the labourer asked Mina.

‘Yes. I teach there. My student Hassan showed me your tablet and I just wanted to know where you found it.’

The old man looked apprehensive, ‘He told me that I wouldn’t get into trouble’.

‘I assure you that you’re not in trouble at all. I’m asking you these questions because if I know where the tablet was found, I could learn more about it’.

‘I don’t think the man understands what you’re on about,’ Jack said to Mina.

‘There may be more similar objects where you found this one,’ she said to the man.

‘Oh no. You won’t find anything there,’ he replied.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Mina.

‘My son found the tablet in the rubble of a bombed house,’ he explained.

‘A house?’ Mina asked, trying to hide the growing excitement in her voice.

‘Yes, but I think it came from a building buried under the house which was bombed. And since then, the whole area has been bombed again.’

‘Could you show us where it was? We will pay you for your time of course,’ Mina added quickly.

‘Follow me please,’ he answered immediately.

They left the house and moved through squalid streets. Rats roamed freely and the rubbish gave off the horrendous smell of decay. They walked on and on. With each step Mina felt more uneasy. She looked at Jack, as if to say ‘I’m sorry… and I’m worried’. But his relaxed demeanour calmed her.

‘Is it much further?’ she asked.

‘Not much. We’re almost there,’ replied the labourer.

The street lead to a large open space, the size of a football field. They walked over the rubble. The old man hadn’t lied. An entire block had been razed to the ground by at least two air strikes. It was a horrific scene of destruction. Like everyone else, she had heard about the air strikes, but she had not fully realised their awesomely destructive power: they simply obliterated everything in their path.

The old man stopped, half way across the area, and pointing his finger to a spot on the ground, simply said ‘here’. She paid him for his time and he walked away, thanking God for his luck. Jack watched Mina getting down to work, rummaging among the stones. After a while, she picked up a stone, and her face changed, screwed up in intense thought.

‘What’s up Mina?’ asked Jack.

‘What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up. Look at this,’ she said with cold fury, showing him a small piece of stone covered with inscriptions.

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s Hebrew, Jack. Hebrew.’

‘And?’ he asked again, with a look of total incomprehension.

‘It means our wonder boys up there bombed a house which must have been built over an ancient synagogue. Then they bombed it again. We won’t find anything useful now.’

She sat down on a pile of rubble, exhausted and defeated, and started to cry. Jack let her cry for a moment, then sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

‘I didn’t know you were Jewish. I had no idea.’

‘I’m not Jewish. My father’s Muslim and my mother’s Christian’, she answered between sniffles.

‘So… why are you crying?’ he asked, bewildered.

‘I’m crying because this must have been a long lost synagogue that Benjamin of Tudela described in his travels. And, as if it wasn’t enough, this was the very place that my stone tablet came from.’

‘Time out! I’m totally lost right now. You’re going to have to tell me more or nothing at all.’

‘OK. But I need to get out of here,’ she said, wiping the tears from her face.

‘Right. I know a nice cafe in the old city. I’ll take you there.’

Chapter 10

Mina sat across from Jack in his favourite cafe. She took a sip of tea and started talking almost immediately. ‘I’m researching the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish merchant who lived in Spain in the 12th century. He left his country in 1166 for a long series of travels that lasted almost a decade.’

‘That’s some holiday.’

She pretended not to have heard his joke and continued.

‘Well, although he wrote a lot, and his Book of Travels is a very learned account of the socio-political world of his time, he was nevertheless a merchant and as such, spent a long time in Baghdad, which was a thriving and opulent Jewish centre.’

‘OK. So the man was a clever merchant.’

‘Are you going to interrupt me all the time?’ asked Mina.

‘No no, just get to the point.’

‘Fine. His writings were already disseminated in his lifetime but proper publications and most translations date from the 16th century onwards. The original and oldest manuscripts date back to the 12th century and are in the British Library, and the libraries of Rome, Vienna and Oxford. The British Library’s manuscript is the finest of them all, and the purest.

‘The purest?’ asked Jack, desperately trying to keep up with Mina’s account.

‘Yes, the other manuscripts contain pieces inserted by other writers. The British Library manuscript is bound with very few other works. Anyway, when I accessed it at the British Library for research, I noticed in the catalogue that there was another manuscript with the same number, 27.089.’

‘You actually remember accession numbers of manuscripts?’

Of course I do. I only worked on a few manuscripts by Tudela. I asked the librarian about this, he checked and said I had misread the number, which was actually 27.089bis. It was a sort of adjunct manuscript, a bundle of pages with Arabic poems. To cut a long story short, among them I discovered unpublished travel notes written by Benjamin of Tudela himself.’

‘Can we call him Benny? I’m not an academic.’

‘No we can’t. Don’t you respect anything?’ she replied, irritated.

‘Yes. You.’

She smiled and pulled her pocket computer out of her bag.

‘Here’s my rough translation of his travel notes: Free at last. This morning I took my first deep breath since that fated day in Nineveh. Who would have thought that keeping this secret would burden me more than my travel bags? Maybe I should not have read what I read; maybe I should have tried to turn my gaze away. Who knows? I have sent a letter to my dear friend Mordechai in Safed explaining my findings in the old synagogue in Nineveh. Maybe he will choose to pursue this quest. He is young, vigorous and learned. I am too tired to pursue anything but my young nephews who like to play hide-and-seek among the orange trees in our orchard. I will leave it to Mordechai and others to find out whether it is true or not. If it is, and the object is indeed found, it will be of