Tale 3: The Man Plans
In the fall of 1891 I met Doktor Stumper at his villa in Jerusalem's German Colony. Unaccustomed to being interrupted, he lectured me on his own veranda on why his trips in search of the Grail reached no findings as a Syrian girl served me tea who couldn't be more than thirteen.
For the 150 minutes thereafter, he recited by memory the story of Christ's last supper in all four Gospels, then in the six gospels of the Apocrypha - reciting them all in Greek, Hebrew, German, Latin, Turkish and Arabic.
His wife and five children sat in rapt attention, and therefore I had a distinct feeling that indicating any sign of boredom would result in the possibility of scandal, and more significantly, not getting the job.
After concluding the Gospel of Bardesanes in Arabic, he announced in German a conclusion from readings of the Gospel of Pseudo Matthew that the Holy Grail was placed by the Knights Templar within the bowels of the Temple Mount, digging a tunnel from the crusaders' church upon the Temple Mount, the Templum Domini, placing it all the way down in the ruins of King Solomon's temple. It obviously would take an enormous amount of time to dig all the way down to the Solomonic temple, during which the objections of Muslims would be overwhelming.
Herr Doktor then announced that to find the Holy Grail, we shall blow up the Temple Mount with dynamite.
Doktor Stumper explained his conclusion that the ruins of the Solomonic temple were 250 meters beneath the "Dome of the Rock", the al-Aqsa Mosque. Beneath the Dome lies the Bir al-Arwah, the 'Well of Souls,' where the spirits of the dead await their final judgement. He recalled what the 11th century Persian poet Nasir Khusraw wrote of it:
"They say that on the night of his Ascension into heaven, the Prophet, prayed first at the Dome of the Rock, laying his hand upon the Rock. As he went out, the Rock, to do him honour, rose up, but he laid his hand on it to keep it in its place and firmly fixed it there. But by reason of this rising up, it is even to this present day partly detached from the ground beneath."
It was Doktor Stumper's view that the dynamite must be placed in the Well of Souls and exploded from there. Since we could not risk damaging the ruins of Solomon's temple, we would have to blast down merely to the ruins of King Herod. And since Doktor Stumper concluded that the blast would collapse the Knights Templar tunnel, we must then dig a tunnel of our own, past potential ruins of the Maccabian and Nehamian eras to finally arrive at the Solomonic Temple, where which the Templars placed the Grail.
As an engineer with expertise in the transport of weapons, Doktor Stumper wanted my professional opinion on how much TNT was necessary to blast a roughly 185 meter hole in the mountain that would lodge us directly at the Herodian temple ruins
I told him frankly that this plan's success was extraordinarily unlikely. I had been to Jerusalem six times, and on four of them had walked the Temple Mount - once even permitted to see the Well of Souls. The Well is six meters on each side, and for a blast to create such a hole, he would require 10000 killograms of nitroglycerine explosives, which could not possibly fit within the well. There are, furthermore, no safe means to transport this volatile cargo either by land or sea; nor would customs inspectors ever look kindly on allowing explosives of this magnitude within their borders. Lastly, as Jerusalem's Old City is nearly impossible to travel but by foot, the Old City would require an entirely new system of roads and ramps for vehicles with wheels over relatively long distances, which would further result in the extreme provocation of the Jerusalemite population and perhaps even every monotheistic believer in the world.
Doktor Stumper listened to my objections stonefacedly and silent. Upon my concluded remarks he referred to my objections as mere trivialities. 1. He would hire the necessary technicians to expand the Well of Souls to whatever dimensions I stipulated, along with workers for every foreseen requirement. 2. For this project, he had the full backing of the Kaiser's treasury and diplomatic corps. Whatever money and connections required were at my disposal's fullest measure. All necessary Ottoman and Palestinian authorities could be bribed, cajoled, persuaded, and threatened into compliance, as could authorities in any countries traversed en route to destination. 3. Herr Doktor Stumper had a cousin by marriage, one Herr Daimler, at work on just such a transit vehicle, called a 'truck', which provides exactly the safe transit of weapons we require. 4. When the world beholds the properties of the Holy Grail, all further objections are irrelevant.
I told him success was unlikely for a hundred more variables, but would venture any design for smoothly ramped roads he required for the Old City. To my offer Herr Doktor swiftly agreed and told me my full-time services would be unnecessary for some years, but he shall keep me on retainer. The German Reich would deposit one-hundred-fifty thousand gold marks every year in a bank of my choosing until such time as my expertise was required, at which point I would be required to relinquish any other project to work exclusively for him in Palestine. The gold marks would arrive for me in New York every year on exactly January 1st, and every year I must send him a new schematic at this address for just such a road based on whatever new technology evolved in the intervening year.
It was the last I was to hear from the Doktor for nineteen years.
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On Easter Sunday 1910 I received a telegram ordering me to Jerusalem with immediate haste. An ocean liner had been booked arriving in Normandy, along with passage through transcontinental passage along the Mediterranean railroads. I would arrive sometime in June provided with all necessary accommodations. I had one night to say goodbye to my family, from whom I'd be parted less than one year.
Upon my Jerusalem arrival a chauffeur took me with immediate haste to Herr Doktor Stumper's residence rather than my own. Upon arrival the chauffeur lead me to a drawing room with walls decorated floor to ceiling: framed medieval maps of Jerusalem, medieval and Byzantine paintings of Christ at the Last Supper, at the Garden of Gesthamene, and every station of the cross, along with speculative drawings of the Temple Mount in every historical period. Doktor Stumper was no longer dressed in a bourgeois suit but in the dress of an Arabic knight - white qaffia and galabea. I was soon to discover that months after our last meeting, he'd left his family for a Syrian Orthodox girl one third his age with whom he now had four more children, the two older sons were staring at my schematics with their father, speaking to each other in ancient Greek.
He greeted me with a hasty "Gruss gott." and switched immediately to his accented but correct in every particular English.
"I regret we have much work. I have elected to use your Road Plan C to construct limestone pavement leading us directly to Jewish Quarter's southern Mughrabi Gate, where we shall use Ramp Plan E to construct a ramped boulevard leading us from Mughrabi Gate to Temple Mount, and then we shall depart via an eastern elevated thoroughfare leading us to St. Stephen's Gate at the Muslim Quarter's edge. It is regrettable that Muslims will find objectionable a small encroachment upon their quarter, but we have compensated sufficiently the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Ottoman Consul in Nablus to depopulate the old city for one hundred hours and imprison any potential subversives."
"Has the Jewish population been consulted about what we mean to do?"
"An immaterial obstacle. The Jewish Quarter is barely occupied, we shall give them access to their two historic temples, and they quite obviously may rebuild their quarter as they see appropriate. Though I highly suspect the current Jewish increase in Palestinian presence to be a temporary affair."
"Please forgive me for inquiring but how will the Islamic population respond to your demolition of their third most sacred relic?"
"I shall explain more fully later, but will very briefly confide in you that if we are correct about the Holy Grail's properties, opposition from the Islamic community will thereafter be absolutely irrelevant."
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Pikesville used to have two bagel shops to which everybody went, now it has one. It used to have five delis, four have closed and only one new deli opened. It has five synagogues within a square half-mile of each other with a sanctuary capacity of well over a thousand people each, and even on high holidays the capacity has not been filled for any of them in at least twenty-five years. Sure. Pikesville has other bagel shops, other delis, other synagogues, but no others have the official impromptur of a ‘name.’
When you said you were going to ‘Joan & Gary’s’, everybody knows you were getting bagels. When you said Suburban House, everybody knew you were getting deli. When you said you were going to ‘Beth Tfiloh’, everybody knew how to drive there even if it was tucked away where Old Court Road made a sudden hard turn and became the simple farm land which was all of Pikesville until we Jews moved out there - a land without people for a people without land.
For deli we now have the Essen Room, opened four years ago, which is enough of a deli that nobody complains about missing Suburban House - Emperor of Baltimore Delis, on the property of the Suburban Club, where all the rich Baltimore Jews went who wanted to hide their wealth - as opposed to the Woodholme Club, where all the rich Baltimore Jews went who wanted to display their wealth.
Everybody complained about the Suburban House when it was open… to eat to the Suburban House was a ticket to non-stop show of middle class Jews yelling at each other, yelling about the food, yelling at their kids, yelling at the waiter, yelling about splitting the bill. But it was Suburban House... where you went to celebrate any event and home to the best Tuna Sandwich in Baltimore, usually served with a free side of local Utz potato chips and a dill pickle spear sour enough to pull you through a wormhole. It was the Suburban House, why would anyone ever think to stop going? But one day ten years ago it burned practically to a cinder, and it was as though Pikesville as anyone understood it had burned down with it. It re-opened six blocks up Reisterstown Road nearer to the Beltway in Pomona Square, where rival deli Attman's used to have its county location, but the new Suburban House was never the same.... It closed on the very week the Essen Room opened, and the Essen Room has an ersatz vibe of Jews now too old for deli, a feeling Suburban House and Miller's came by so naturally. Only Lenny's still has its location on Pikesville's northern border with Owings Mills, and Attman’s only has its downtown location where it's been since 1915, the Pikesville Attman's having gone out of business 30 years ago, as did Kaplan's in westerly nextdoor Randallstown, which is now just a goysiher outfit near Catonsville for corporate deli trays. A few years ago both closed Miller's, the lower class deli where the sandwiches could give instant diarrhea and the floor had all the same grease as the hot dogs, and Snyder’s, the upper-middle class deli in the 'Pink Mall,' a mini-mall literally painted pink, where teenagers went before seeing a movie at Loewe's, and families went after shopping for bar-mitzvah suits at Cohen's.
For kosher supermarkets, dear Shapiro's is a memory so distant nobody remembers it at all. All the comers since like Miracle Market, Seasons, have never lasted. Now it's Market Maven's turn to get stoned by the market, but all that's left is Seven Mile Market, which is not even on Seven Mile Lane anymore because an edifice so Herodian requires store-space large enough to accomodate an historic monument of modern Judaism meant to last as long as the Methusaleh. Seven Mile Market is the single largest kosher supermarket in the world. Just to park in its lot is to hear it crow "I am Seven Mile, kashrus of kashrus, look upon my varnishkes, ye mashgiachs, and despair." It is a kosher market as big as a Walmart and like Walmart, the quality is somewhere between meh and feh.
For bagels, Joan and Gary's is also just a distant memory from the 20th century, but there’s still ‘Goldberg’s, so successful now it's even franchised to the DC suburbs. Goldberg's is as extraordinary a place as the last living link with the old Pikesville should ever be liberals always complain about the owner’s racism. And all the megashuls are still obviously there, even if you have to explain to most people how to get there. The only thriving food business is the caterers, old mainstays like O'Fishel's and the Kinsh Shop are still around because every Shiva House needs food.
But Goldberg’s is still the ‘shtetl square’ baruch hashem... One should not excuse the behavior of great geniuses, and the guy who owns or runs Goldberg's is notoriously an asshole but dear god does the pandemic make me miss that place, and I'm sure there are thousands who feel the same way: all the old frummies haggling Talmud, orthodox mothers perpetually trying to shush their kids, old ladies with platinum perms from the early 60s playing bridge as they complain about their middle aged children while gossiping about everybody else’s. The gorgeous bubbly frummette in her 20s whom they force to take the orders so that we’re put off from yelling at the staff from the moment we come in. The mentally challenged guy who's always wiping down the coffee station. The guys behind the take home counter always yelling at each other.
Every day I crave their bagels: Poppyseed and fresh from the oven, with a cement mortar of cream cheese, topped lox, chives, and a ripe slice of tomato; along with a decent cup of coffee with plenty of milk. Sometimes I get the lox and tomato in an omlette with feta cheese and spinach. Every ethnicity has food for which one bite is home and peace. How much moreso is this true in an ethnicity of permanent transplants? Like every Yid, one bite of a good matzoh ball soup and most of us are six years old in Bubbie's kitchen, who learned to make it from her mother, who learned to make it from her mother in north-east Poland (and let's not talk about how her mother died...), who no doubt learned to make it from her's, in a process that goes at least all the way back to the early 1600's, perhaps much earlier, and it's one of the few things we have left of this culture that is both unbroken in its continuity and completely broken in the specifics.
Many non-Jews will not understand at all, either the inner experience or the outer one of why Jews deem it important. So many goyim can trace their lineage back to when their families got here, which is hundreds of years ago. However guilty some may feel about the inherited privilege of centuries, they'll never be without it, and they will feel at home everywhere they go in this country. But even in Pikesville, there is only one place you can go where you can eat a bagel while you can overhear Yiddish spoken. Yeah, the owner of Goldberg's is a bigot, no question of that, and most liberal Jews could tell stories,... I tried to boycott, I just couldn't do it. Because it's one of the only places where Jews are guaranteed to feel like Jews. But why Goldberg's is a semi-magical experience is something only we would understand anyway.
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Schliemann needed his own fortune to discover Troy, but the second Reich provided all the money we needed.
It was elected that dynamite be transmitted via 19 six-masted wooden schooners departing from Hamburg - each measured at over 100 meter length; the movement of trains being far too volatile for dynamite, combustion on frigates much too incendiary, and transmission via trucks far too public. If a wooden sailboat explodes from nitroglycerine, the ship burns so quickly that any identifiable remnants would sink in ninety seconds. The explosion would have to be seen by the naked eye to even know of its occurrence. Transmitted in the schooner's lower decks along with the explosive cargo would be forty-three elite German soldiers in each boat - 817 in total. A further 5183 soldiers had gradually traveled to Palestine by train and frigate over the last eight years, all trained to pose themselves as Austro-Hungarian Jews - all of them trained in a second language: some Yiddish, some modern Hebrew, some Hungarian or Czech. all of them trained to chant Jewish prayers, and each trained to adopt a specific rural accent of townspeople in the Austro-Hungarian hinterland so no one could properly identify their town of origin. They were instructed to fight for the Jews against native populations if necessary, marry if necessary, have children if necessary, then abandon their families after the operation's completion. These undercover Germans comprised roughly 13% of Palestine's Jewish population.
The weapons would arrive not in Jaffa but a soon to be incorporated sea settlement called Tel Aviv, where few people lived and transfer of goods likely passes without notice. The explosives would load onto two hundred Daimler Paukbauerei Zweibrucken trucks designed for smooth transit and connected by intercom. The explosives would travel to Jerusalem by convoy at extremely slow speeds.
The 817 weapons experts who traveled in the schooners with the dynamite would sit roughly 4 to each of the two-hundred trucks. One to drive, one to sit passenger side and watch for any counter-operations, and two to preserve the condition of the cargo. Thirteen hundred forty-two soldiers would post themselves within easy running distance of the road every fifty meters between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem carrying knife and pistol. With desert conditions allowing for easy visibility, a further sixty-nine sharpshooters were placed every kilometre between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem at a distance from the road greater than a kilometre, each sniper outfitted both with the latest Gwehr rifles. Three thousand thirty-three plain clothes soldiers placed themselves around Jerusalem streets and public spaces, looking for potential subversives who might get wind of the operation and look to subvert it - all soldiers were instructed to shoot immediately upon suspicion. A further 467 soldiers would stand armed guard around the gates of the Old City. 203 would guard inside the Temple Mount. 78 would guard inside the Mosque. The German army's six best engineers would venture into the Well of Souls and within six hours will have expanded the Well of Souls to 36 meters by 36, six times its size. Once in place, the eight hundred weapons experts would load the explosives into the six-by-six-by-six enlarged Well of Souls within a half-hour. All the soldiers standing within the blast radius would explode along with the Temple Mount. Our estimated death toll was 373 soldiers, whom the Kaiserreich would memorialize for all time.
There was not a single Arab or Jewish construction worker. They were thousands of Turkish, Greek, Persian, and Afghan workers, imported from their countries' smallest towns so there would be no likelihood of any worker speaking Arabic. Their mission was simply to demolish half the comparatively small Jewish quarter and 10% of the comparatively enormous Muslim quarter, then rebuild that 15% of the Old City on a series of inclines leading up to the Temple Mount, and do it all in three days. Their sleeping quarters were not near in Jerusalem but the Judean desert where they slept in tents and were shuttled every day to the worksite by truck convoy. There was much discussion of what to do with the workers after they completed their assignment.
The Old City's entire residential population was ordered to leave their homes temporarily and resettle, on the excuse that Jerusalem had a terrorism threat so sinister that the Old City itself may be blown up, and every resident of the Old City must be treated as a suspect. Further residents near the old city were required to evacuate their homes in the neighborhoods of Yemin Moshe, Mamilla, Nahalat Shiv'a and Musara - all sealed off with the severest penalties imposed for intrusion. A further two-thousand soldiers were placed undercover around the remaining neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The nearest place to the Old City to remain open was the Train Station, which we required to remain open so that the majority of undercover soldiers can get into place.
For the duration of the operation, Christians were relocated to Bethlehem, Jews to Jericho, and Muslims to Ramallah with constructed temporary housing for all. Most of the Old City would remain untouched and within a week's time, residents would return to their homes; almost all finding them exactly as they'd been left. Those in the Jewish Quarter who'd lost their homes would receive handsome compensation from the German government in the disguised form of relief organizations. By the time suspicion truly fermented, the operation would long since be complete and all objections to it irrelevant.
It was decided that the entire operation should take four days at most. Two days' journey is the amount of time it would take an above average suspicious person to reach Jaffa by foot. All telecommunications from Jerusalem would be cut, and remaining Jerusalemites would be told it was for their own safety. If a suspicious Jerusalemite near the Old City had bypassed the order to leave, they'd likely be seen by the thousands of undercover German soldiers patrolling Jerusalem. Were they missed by those soldiers, they'd be apprehended by the undercover soldiers who'd been secretly policing every car of Palestinian trains for three years - on lookout for any persons of interest who may have reason to profit from learning our German secret. The only authorities such eavesdroppers would be able to notify are people brought to the Old City of Jerusalem from the Mediterranean by foot. The Ottoman police departments in Jaffa and Haifa were instructed to remain strictly uninterested in any reports of suspicious activity in Jerusalem. Let's just posit, on happenstance, that such a busybody saw what we're doing to Jerusalem.. They would immediately be arrested. Were they not arrested in Jerusalem and boarded a train, they would immediately be apprehended on the train through psychological profiling of the anxious. The only transit they could travel with any hope of success was by foot, and any person of authority they could interest in Jerusalem happenings would not be immediately convinced. Perhaps the strongest walker could do the walk to Jaffa in a single day and the walk back in another, it still would take him day at very least to convince any policeman to return with him back to Jerusalem, and two more days to bring any other authorities with them. The likelihood of any of this was astronomically small. With all these variables in place, four days was the amount of time it would take for absolutely no variables to be out of place.
The Mughrabi Gate, also referred to as the Dung Gate, would be expanded from the size built by the glorious architects of Suleiman the Magnificent, who never had to countenance transit larger than a caravan. A road of pure Jerusalem limestone would gradually incline the trucks from the Dung Gate to the heights of the Temple Mount, and a second limestone ramp would descend the trucks from the Temple Mount to St. Stephen's Gate in the East, just over the end of the Muslim quarter. Regrettably, the Western Wall, so holy to the Jews, would be sealed off by the road to near-completion.
Whispers among the Stumper household held that the Kaiser telegraphed every day himself for information on progress.
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When you grow up in 1990s Pikesville, you know a lot of overachievers, and if you’re not one of them, resentment at them grows in you like a cancer yet you simultaneously become more comfortable in their company than you’d have ever thought possible. You begin to wonder how you came from a place where so many people seemed marked from birth for the super-class, 90% of the world cannot even fathom the potential for as much influence and privilege as most American Jews Bar Mitzvahed in the 90s had every reason to expect would be ours from cradle to grave; privilege to which our parents knew nothing like until adulthood, grandparents only ascended to in dotage, and peasant great-grandparents could only imagine. When it came time for the young Jews of northwest Baltimore to go out into the world, they realized that better jobs awaited them outside of the ghetto eruv, and they barely hesitated. Pikesville Jews of my generation were the best educated people to ever grow up in our city, and when they left, they took with them their talents, their knowledge, their resources, and their problem solving skills. What they took with them was the prosperity that once was Baltimore's and is now the property of cities that don’t really need more.
For college and grad school, most of our parents went to state schools, or at best, to local private universities. Our parents lived their Baby Boomer lives during the one or two generations when a boss could look on a resume whose distinguishing feature was a public alma mater, and nevertheless would consider the candidate on par with an Ivy Leaguer. Our parents used their greater opportunities to send their children to better schools – no longer public schools or Yeshivas or city/state universities but Jewish day schools, private schools, Ivy League universities, private liberal arts colleges - birthing a new elite that includes Jews rather than keeps us out, but whenever this new elite falls, the gentiles will be fine, they’ll simply use the power they’ve always held to put things back to the way they were. The only members of the elite who could suffer widespread retribution will be, as usual, us. It’s a time honored tradition for Jewish parents to complain about their kids’ laziness, but the urgency among my generation of Jews to achieve is something unheard of even to our parents, let alone to the rest of America. Most American families reached the pinnacle of their earning power in the late sixties, and since then there’s been a slow, steady, humiliating decline in their standard of living. Most of 2019’s upper-class American gentiles had great-grandparents who lived the same way. On the other hand, the average Jew could only reach his top earning power at the beginning of the 1970s, and since then the earning power of the average American Jews has only increased in real terms. Excepting Americans of Asian extraction for whom upward mobility is a worldwide trend, we are the only ethnic group in America for whom this is true. Jews were the final ethnic group to reach the American upper classes, and the moment after we did, we helped goyim slam the door shut.
And yet, who can blame us? We continually pay for our success in blood, would it ever change if we refused that success and shared it? Would those other people who shared in our success not rise up and kill us just as everyone else has?
Where we are now is, in every way, the most familiar position in Jewish History. The 'protected', the model minority, the exception which shows that it is possible to rise in the world no matter how difficult the circumstances seem so long as you exert yourself with enough diligence and intelligence and practical sense - the only experience other cultures need to develop that sense too is 3000 years of dodging genocides.... We are not the most powerful people in the world, but the most powerful people in the world depend on us. We are their 'middlemen.' Their lawyers, their doctors, their accountants, their PR, their consultants. And consequently, however many rewards we get, whenever things go bad, we are the first to be blamed because it's much easier to blame the help than the leadership. And eventually, everything goes bad. All social orders crumble, and however prosperous we think we are in any country in the entirety of world history, we are the first lambs thrown to lions.
We build our old land in the new land, and in every country: we are fruitful and increase abundantly until new kings arise who know not our stories and dreams say to the people: behold Israel is more and mightier than we. Let us deal wisely lest they multiply, and they join our enemies in war and fight against us. Therefore they set taskmasters to afflict us with their burdens, and our treasure builds their treasure, and we are made to serve with rigour, bitter with hard bondage. We wax exceeding mighty, and then we wane, and wane, and work, and work, and wait. and wait, and wait. It is the story not just of Egypt, but of the Soviet Union and Germany, of Polish Ukraine and the Ottoman Empire, of Spain and Portugal, France and England, the Caliphates and the Crusades, Ancient Rome and Seleucid Greece, Babylon and Persia, Assyria and Amalek. One day, it will be the story of America just as it is everywhere else, and perhaps even one day the story and state of Israel.
Such is the unique and lonely state of Jews, can we truly be blamed for not risking what is ours when we are called to eternal risk by whatever universal force calls us to history? Are our dreams of dignity to blame through 3000 years of evidence that dignity is the one state never allowed Jews of every era and world corner? Submit to being a Jew and we're the leading act in the auto-da-fe - burned and fried for gentile amusement, rebel against being a Jew and we become the prison priest - torturing Jews who made a different decision into confessing crimes they didn't commit. In every time and place, we rise and we rise and we rise, and then at the moment our security seems finally permanent, we fall, fall, fall, fall - so quickly the fall kills half of us and sends the other half to exile from yet another land we thought was home. For every Jew, home is just another exile.
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We chose October 20th to begin the operation. To my astonishment and Doktor Stumper's prediction, the plan went off as if in a dream in September. Two hundred trucks formed a convoy of explosives from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in perfect formation at exactly 17 kilometers per hour with a precise 19.6 meter distance between each truck.
On the morning of October 23rd, Herr Doktor and I arrived at our temporary perch atop the Dung Gate where we would witness two hundred trucks enter the Old City from the south. Herr Doktor was dressed again in his regalia of an Arab knight and of atypically warm disposition. For the only time, he spoke unguardedly of his aims: "Mein Freund, you will soon drink from the juices of your heroic contributions to our quest. He who drinks from the Grail will receive the blessing of eternal life from Christ. All Germany and its peoples shall gain eternity, and the German soldier can fight a war of conquest invincibly against the very Ottomans with whom we collaborated. Please understand, mein weisser bruder, the Kaiserreich in no way means to conquer the world, we wish merely to compare our empire unashamedly to our Saxon and Frankish brethren to the West. We mean to share in this conquest with all of Germanic bloodlines. We shall offer drink from the Grail to Britons, Scandinavian, the Niederlanders, and even Northern Europeans in the United States. All from pure Germanic and Northern European bloodlines are welcome to the Cup of Christ, and all all other peoples will be bred under us to live at our service.
"Excuse me Herr Doktor, but I might inquire, as my parents were German Jews, would I qualify for this great service?"
"Herr Miller..." The Doktor hesitated before giving answer and for the first time seemed genuinely flummoxed.
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It was a mere ten seconds later when when our unblemished road was permeated by the bleat of a sheep. The first truck was a mere half-kilometre away. With every honk of the first truck's newly invented car horn, the sheep would bleat back, unmoved. This interchange between carhorn and sheep continued a dozen and a half times, yet as the trucks advanced, and the sheep was intractable from its place. For the first time in my experience, the Doktor grew flummoxed and visibly sweat amid the Jerusalem heat.
It was at this moment that a very dirty windswept man of unshaven countenance ran up to collect the sheep.
As the Doktor was a speaker of Aramaic and I merely of Hebrew, I managed to basically peace together the conversation between the shepherd and the Doktor:
"I'm so sorry. This sheep's a difficult one who's never responded well to loud noises. I think he might be hard of hearing."
"How are you in this area?"
"What is your name?"
"What?"
"What is your name!"
"My name is of no consequence!"
"My name is Shalom Shalom, and I live just over this gate."
"Why did you come back here?"
"Why did I come back here? This is my home! Jews have always lived here! I've lived next to Mughrabi Gate all my life, my father lived next to Mughrabi Gate, his father lived next to Mughrabi Gate, his father lived next to Mughrabi Gate, hi...
"Why are you here?"
"Why shouldn't I be here? I went to the deserta for a month so that I wouldn't have to spend the high holidays with my in-laws."
"Have you heard nothing of what's going to happen?"
"What's going to happen?"
"I demand you to leave right now."
"What's the rush?"
"You must leave immediately."
"Why are you white and dressed like an Arab?"
"What?"
"Why are you wearing an Arab dress?"
"My Emir's clothing is no concern of yours."
"I'm just saying it looks weird."
"Leave this place immediately!"
"Why should I leave? Do you know how much trouble it was to get here? I took my brothers' sheep too and you see how hard some of them are to keep together."
"You have more sheep?"
"I have a hundred sheep." The shepherd Shalom turned around to call "Eretz!"
And there appeared on the other side of the road a boy who was clearly Herr Shalom's son, and crossing the road with him a flock of 99 more sheep just 75 meters behind him.
Dr. Stumper immediately put his intercom to his mouth and six times shouted "HALT UND ALLE RAUS!" but no one heard his run with all his might to the nearest stairwell, but realizing he would not have enough time to halt the passage, he sustained the 12 meter drop. One could hear the snap of his leg through any number of carhorns and sheep; and through what must have been unendurable pain he walked his way to the middle of the road and shouted "HALT UND ALLE RAUS!" literally eight times before the front driver understood and shouted "HALT UND ALLE RAUS" into his intercom. Hueing to our drilled automotive contingency plans, each of the drivers decelerated the slow-going trucks at exactly one kilometre per hour per second, and each came to a stop in exactly nineteen seconds, at which point each truck was put into park and every soldier evacuated and ran to a safe distance.
The Doktor had collapsed on the road itself and seemed unable to get up.
"Here, let me help you up Mr. Emir."
"I can help myself up."
"Your leg is broken there's no way for you to walk anywhere."
"Yes it is broken but it is a minor inconvenience."
"Eretz, watch the flock!"
Herr Shalom carried Doktor Stumper through the Dung Gate to his apartment which seemed to be one of the few unaffected by the rebuilding; carried the Doktor up his three flights to the presence of an attic door, which when opened led to the top of the wall, directly next to where we both had stood and I still was. Herr Shalom set the good Doktor leaning against the wall.
"Here, let me set the bone for you."
"I can set my own bone."
"I can help." and Herr Shalom set the bone before Doktor Stumper could object, instead Doktor Stumper replied with a curt.
"Very well, you've helped us and we thank you, now go about any business you like but leave the city."
"I don't understand why you want me to leave the city so much."
"It is not your concern, this city belongs to us now."
"Did somebody invade it again?"
Finally Doktor Stumper switched to English: "I do not have time for this! Where are my sharpshooters?"
"I'm just saying that if somebody invaded the city again the least my brother could have done is go to the desert and warn me about it!"
"Herr Miller, do you have a gun?"
"Wait. Why does the city look so different?"
"ICH BRAUCHE EINE WAFFE" the Doktor shouted off the rampart.
"Where are all the people?"
"Herr Miller I require your help."
"Yes?"
"Please lead this man to any German soldier and they can escort him to the proper place to deposit of such agitators."
"Don't worry. I never learned Arabic but I can tell when I'm not wanted. I'll leave, and you'll never hear from Shalom Shalom ever again."
"Leave immediately if you wish to live a moment longer."
"It's because of the mess, isn't it? I told my brother to clean up the hay and manure after I was gone but of course after a whole seven weeks he doesn't pick up anything at all."
Finally I venture my opinion, in English: "Herr Doktor, I don't think we need to eliminate this intruder. I think we can explain certain aspects of this project in a somewhat falsified view and he is not intelligent enough to sort truth from falsehood."
"Very well, you may proceed with an attempt."
I switched to biblical Hebrew, which he seemed to understand about as well as I understood Aramaic. "We are rebuilding the Jewish Quarter so that everyone may have better access to the Temple Mount. We've built ramps to get in and out and those trucks on the road are carrying more building materials into the city."
"Where are the apartments that used to be near mine?"
"They were regrettably demolished, and the residents will be resettled elsewhere."
"You mean, all my neighbors are gone?"
"I'm afraid so.
..."This is the greatest news of my life! You have no idea how bad Benvenuto Bendit is. He's a pig who thinks he runs the neighborhood because his family's been here since 1609. Well, the Shaloms and the Aravs have lived next to Mughrabi Gate since before they were Shaloms and Aravs! And then there are those German Jews across the street, they think they're so fancy with their western jackets and that scratchy music they play..."
"Mr. Shalom, if you went back into the desert for just one more day, I think you would be very happy with the results but we need the Old City to ourselves for just 24 more hours to finish the project."
Mr. Shalom was immediately convinced, came down to his son and their sheep, but saw that the sheep who'd caused the first commotion had not moved. "I'm so glad to hear about Benvenuto leaving, that pig may he rot. I'd leave for a month if you got rid of more enemies of mine.
"I regret we can't do that for you Mr. Shalom. Can you please take care of that sheep?"
"Eretz, call the sheep back with your pipes."
While the sheep stood perfectly still, Mr. Shalom's son produced a set of shepherd pipes and played melody so lulling it seemed utterly at one with this mysterious city, its people, and the very land which produced them.
"BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH" the sheep squawked and ran headlong into the front truck whose explosion sent sheep and carparts flying, some of which landed on the second car which landed on the third, then the fourth, causing a chain reaction that caused the sheep themselves to stampeed in the direction of the explosions. First one sheep flying, then two, then four, then eight. In ninety seconds, there were no cars and no sheep.
The Germans paid the Ottoman administration to rebuild the old city exactly as it was.
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