While standing in the church’s atrium under the open sky, Nissim told me about the succession of kings, pharaohs, emperors, caliphs, and sultans who had conquered the Holy City, and about the religious wars, the Crusades; stories of saints and pilgrims; the destruction of this church in AD 1009; and the disputes over reconstruction up to the present day.
It was a glorious story, rich in detail, woven with passion for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I appreciated Nissim’s animated telling of it and the history I walked through within the walls and under the domes and across the stones walked by multitudes.
But I didn’t feel anything shift inside me: not my skepticism, nor my raging fury at God.
At day’s end, Nissim drove me back to my hotel, on Yafo Street, a four-lane, traffic-choked thoroughfare that cut through the business district. There was no parking in front of the hotel, and in the spaces beyond the no-parking zone was a bus stop, and a municipal bus had pulled in to let on passengers.
Nissim pulled around the bus and the half dozen cars in front of it and parked the Lincoln at the far end of the block. He opened the back door for me, and I told him I’d see him in the morning.
I walked back down Yafo and was mounting the steps to the hotel entrance when a concussive boom cracked through the air, lifting me off my feet and hurling me against the wall of the hotel. Glass shattered and fell on and around me like icicles in a winter hurricane. I was stunned from the impact. I couldn’t breathe.
What had happened? What the hell had happened?
As if a switch had been thrown, cars drove up onto the sidewalk, crashed into streetlights and buildings, collided with other cars. Pedestrians ran through the street, a monochromatic scene of chaos drawn in the charcoal gray of dusk, cut by headlights shining at crazed angles.
I smelled bitter smoke.
But I couldn’t hear a thing.
Chapter 61
SMOKE ROILED through the air, and crowds of terrified people stampeded down Yafo Street.
I was deaf and nearly blind from the smoke, and I realized that a bomb had gone off. A bomb.
Nissim had parked his car a block north of the hotel. Was he alive? Did he need help?
My legs were weak, but I pushed back against the wall and inched up until I was standing. I kept one hand on the wall and stepped down into the pandemonium on Yafo. I peered through the dense smoke, hoping to see to the end of the block, but my eyes were immediately drawn to the remains of the bus we had pulled around only minutes ago.
The explosion had gone off inside it and had surely been deadly. The warped metal crackled with fire as smoke poured up through the void where the roof had been.
And then the bus exploded again.
I saw the back of the bus erupt in flames. I turned my face to the hotel wall, flattened myself against the granite as the silent, roaring heat blew across my back and neck and hands.
When the blast subsided, I turned toward it and ran.
I skirted the flaming bus and kept going through the body-strewn street, which felt much like the killing fields in South Sudan. I was choking on smoke and tears when I reached the car at the corner of the block. Was it Nissim’s Lincoln? I hoped not. I hoped that he had pulled back into traffic before the explosion.
Please.
I walked to the street side of the car and saw Nissim wedged between the car door and the frame. It was him. I knew his white curls, now soaked with blood. His left arm, with his wedding ring on his hand, protruded from the door frame, and he was motionless.
Still, I called his name.
I reached through the shattered window and put two fingers to his jugular. He had no pulse.
“I’m so sorry, Nissim,” I said.
I stepped away from the car and saw a man half under the car behind Nissim’s sedan, lying in blood, his arms covering his head.
I went to his side, but he was gone. When I looked up, I saw a small body in the intersection that could only be that of a child. His legs had been blown off, and his blood was still running into the gutter.
God? What is this? What do You want me to see?
Ten yards away from the man and the child, a young woman struggled to sit up. Her right forearm was gone, and her blood was spouting onto the pavement.
“Please lie down,” I said. “I’m a doctor.”
The woman’s breathing was shallow, and her heartbeat was quickly pumping her life away.
I grabbed at my waist for my handbag, thinking I could use the shoulder strap as a tourniquet. Then I remembered that I had locked up my bag in my room this morning. I wasn’t wearing a belt, and neither was the woman in the street.
A strip of tire was lying nearby, and I needed it. I went back to the woman whose arm had been crudely amputated by the explosion and tied off the ragged wound with the rubber strip. I spoke to her in words I couldn’t hear as red and blue flashers lit up Yafo Street. Firemen, police, medics, and bomb squads were coming into the devastated area.
An ambulance braked next to me, and two medics jumped out of the back. One spoke to me. I pointed to my ears and said, “I can’t hear.”
Would I ever hear again?
The medic’s partner stooped over the woman I had just tried to save. He shook his head no and made a thumbs-down motion.
The woman with the tire tourniquet was dead.
Chapter 62