The Thief
Bakbakkar moves like a lion in the desert, shoulders rocking from side to side as he weaves among patrons of the Cardo. He leaps and plants his feet, knees bending and then extending and propelling him away from an obstacle. The words, “Thief, thief,” follow him, squeezing through narrow openings between people and rising above obstructions only to descend upon his ears and whisper, “Thief.” The words and the boy are faster than his pursuer, the baker. The lean, young thief grips his newly acquired daily bread and dashes through the narrow Jerusalem marketplace hoping to snake his way to safety. His flight could be a child’s foolish game, but it is not. The food he clutches is survival. His hooded face carries no grin or delight; it is grim, and he is determined not only to get away, but to survive another day.
An outstretched hand reaches for him, but he is too quick. A leg juts across his path, but he jumps over it and continues his escape. Stopping to catch his breath, he bends over at the waist, his hands on his knees. He brushes his long, dark brown, curly hair out of his fear-filled eyes, cocks his head and looks behind him. He jerks himself upright. The baker’s extended arm points at him. It lingers, indicating more than direction; it is an inditement, a weapon firing a volley to stun and disarm. Two young men, probably the merchant’s sons, join the chase. Bakbakkar flees.
Fear makes him faster, but less agile in avoiding outstretched hands, arms and legs. Off balance, he crashes into a cart filled with figs and pomegranates, spins around and nearly slams into a woman holding her child’s hand as she absent-mindedly examines a merchant’s dates. The boy stumbles, drops the stolen bread, catches himself with his right hand, and lunges into an alleyway barely wide enough for his thrashing arms and legs. While he is still off balance, strong hands grip the collar of his woolen tunic. His feet slide out from under him, and muscular arms shove him through a doorway. He tumbles down a short flight of stone steps to the smooth, gray rock floor below the level of the street. A bulky woman closes a red, wooden door at the top of the stairway and shuffles down the steps as he gets to his feet. “Quiet,” she cautions. “They may be coming.” Her hand motions for him to be still, moving up and down as if patting an animal or small child. Their heads incline toward the door.
His heart pounds, and his breath rasps from his slender, heaving chest, his mouth wide open not to speak, but to silently draw in air and to exhale fear. His cheerless eyes with drooping eyelids dart from side to side as his vision adjusts to the gray light of the narrow entranceway. Where am I? I’ve got to get out of here.
The woman turns to him when she feels the danger of detection pass. “I did not mean to toss you down the steps. I am Rahab,” she says pointing to herself. “I will help you. Are you hurt?”
Bakbakkar stands, surveys his body for injuries, shakes his head in answer to her question and starts for the door. Rahab steps in front of him, her arms outstretched in front of her with her palms facing the boy. “Safe. You are safe in this place,” she says, “Hungry? For some bread, bread without the mark of the thief on it?”
She knows.
Rahab’s outstretched hand invites him further into her home. He hesitates. Is she what she seems to be—friendly, willing to help? If she is, she is the first in many months. She smiles, her gaze rests comfortably upon him asking for his trust. A slight tilt of her head indicates the direction she wants him to go. He follows her as she walks through an arched doorway into a room with an ornate mosaic floor emblazoned with small palm trees arranged in a rectangle. The green of the palm fronds on the floor is softened by the light of oil lamps clustered on the floor in each corner of the room. A fragrance fills the room and the lungs of every breathing thing as the crushed seeds of an herb dissolved in the oil are consumed in the flames of several lamps. One wall is painted with a pastoral scene of goats and sheep grazing on distant hills. The other three walls are empty calling the viewer’s eyes to the serenity of the artist’s interpretation of peace, a peace Bakbakkar once knew, but no longer remembers.
Bakbakkar does not see the art on the wall, and he ignores the mosaic floor and the sense of peace that suffuses the room as tangibly as the burning oil permeating and perfuming the air. He sees only the porcelain trays piled with bread and dates and a cup brimming with honey-sweetened tea. Food. I’ve not eaten such food in many weeks. I’ve not known kindness—since—his eyes fill with tears, and he turns away from his benefactor.
They sit on plain, dark brown woolen rugs near one of the cluster of oil lamps. He sits cross-legged and eats and drinks in absorbed silence. His head faces the floor, but occasionally his eyes strain upward to glimpse his rescuer.
Rahab leans against a fluffy, green pillow whose color echoes the palm fronds on the floor. She studies her young guest. She grins. The boy is mostly legs. His clothes are tattered and worn, but not torn. He lives on the street, but he has not been there long, judging from his clean fingernails and his washed face. He pushes back his sepia colored cloak revealing sad eyes that rarely look another person in the face, eyes like a mirror reflecting the sadness of the world.
What have these eyes witnessed, she wonders. The eyes of children should glisten with curiosity and mischief. These eyes search for things to steal and escape routes. These eyes continuously survey their surroundings urged on by a predatory mind that looks for weakness. He is like a lion in the desert.
His shoulder length dark brown hair is curly, and the curls contribute to the tangles. One strand of curls bisects his forehead and bounces up and down as he hungrily devours his food.
“What is your name?” she says as she shifts her legs beneath her and lifts her body as it casts a huge, odd-shaped shadow across the room. She rearranges her saffron-colored hulag, its fringe strewn in many directions.
“Bakbakkar,” he says as he tears at the bread with his teeth. She is the first person in this city to know my name.
“Ah, a seeker are you,” she says. “You must have a new name and have it soon.”
He looks up, peering for the first time into her eyes, the first time he has looked directly at another human being in months. “A new name? What’s wrong with my name?” he demands.
“Keep the name you have”—she shrugs—“you die.” She delivers her words without emphasis or emotion, and yet they strike like the hand of an angry parent, like the words of his uncle. He flinches and recoils, as if expecting another blow to land.
Recovering, he glares at the woman. “What do you mean, I’ll die?”
“Ah, you are a thief. Steal and you will be caught and punished.”
She shrugs, “Because you are only a child, when you are caught, your life is not forfeit, only your hand. But when you become a man, if your name is the same, if you remain a thief, your destiny is death.”
The law of the tribes is harsh. The hand of God wrote the first edition of the commandments on stone tablets while the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness after fleeing Egypt. Without order and swift justice, survival in the desert was doubtful; with it, survival was possible. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth brought order to a rebellious people. To the original Ten Commandments, man added interpretations and amendments. The hand that steals is taken from the body, so the hand can never take again. What is done to one man is done to another. An act carries its own punishment.
“Ha. No one will catch me,” he boasts, his words as quick as he believes himself to be.
She smiles, her brown-green eyes and raised eyebrows inviting a reply. “I did.”
His heavy-lidded eyes open, and then narrow. He stiffens and points at the woman. He does not realize it, but he is in that moment a replica of the patriarch who raised him and then banished him from the only home he knew. Each word seems to come not from his mouth, but from the intersection of the end of his finger and his tortured past. “Then you give me a new name if you think it’ll protect me.” Who is this woman? She tells me I will die if I don’t get a new name. What kind of woman is she? She frightens me.
Rahab shakes her head and her coarse, frizzled red hair flows from side to side. “Will not, cannot. The Keeper of Names—he gave you your birth name, Bakbakkar. But the name you need, he cannot give. Nor I. You must find your name. This is yours to do.”
Bakbakkar rocks his head to the side. He speaks, his words like the steady, rapid beat of a drum. “Woman, you know nothing. You make no sense,” he says. He slowly draws the coarse sleeve of his tunic across his lips. Tea no longer drips from his mouth, but his anger is not so easily wiped away. Rage reddens his face, freezes his features and straightens his back.
His body is too small to house such anger. Not even Goliath or a leviathan can contain what he feels. His wrath radiates darkness emerging from a well whose depth increases whenever any human being is abandoned and alone.
Rahab brushes a tangle of red hair from her mouth and lowers her voice. “Ah, there is help for you, Bakbakkar. He is called the Keeper of Names.”
“Huh? Keeper? Keeper of what? Who is this Keeper? What’s his name? Where is he?”
“His name, no one knows. It is not possible to find him. Sometimes—rarely—he finds the one who seeks another name. Are you such a one as this?”
“I don’t need him,” Bakbakkar shouts, his voice rising with every word he speaks. “I’m going to make a name for myself. You’ll see.”
Bakbakkar does not finish the bread or dates. Without a word of gratitude, he puts them in the folds of his tunic. He stares at her and says, “Why did you help me?”
Rahab does not answer immediately. Her eyes study the floor and gaze into a remembered past. She reaches up and touches a multi-colored bead necklace—the kind of necklace a child makes. She draws a few of the beads to her mouth and kisses them.
When she looks at him again, her smile is gone, and her shoulders slump as if she carries a heavy burden. The lines on her face seem deeper, and her eyes glisten with tears. She speaks slowly as if she is giving birth to each sentence. “I had a son your age. He died during the last Passover. I stood on my roof. You ran. I saw people chasing you. The One Who Guides, He directed you to my alleyway. You stumbled. I grabbed you.”
“You gave me food because I remind you of your dead son?” he asks.
The word dead strike her like the gloved hand of a warrior, a glove she cannot sidestep, a word she cannot escape, a word she tries to brush away each day. She leans away from the boy with her hands resting on her protruding stomach. She recovers her composure. “No, because of the One Who Guides. He guides you. He guides me. Because of this you receive food.”
“There’s no one who guides,” he snarls, and as he leaps up, he bumps his cup of tea. It tumbles and bounces across the floor and shatters against the wall with the peaceful, pasture scene etched in it. Bakbakkar stares in disbelief. Memories pound his mind and body. A cup is shattered, and I am broken beyond repair.
He bolts through the arched doorway. He continues up the stone stairs into the narrow alleyway. He does not turn to see if she follows him. He offers no words of thanks. The faded door with its peeling red pigment remains open.
Rahab does not move. Bakbakkar’s swift departure is evidence of how quickly emptiness can return to a house visited by the angel of death. She cries and the light from the lamps in the four corners of the room magnifies her shadow that shakes and shutters with her intensified grief.
She spent only a few minutes with this child of the streets, but he reminded her of Elnaam, her son; he was the delight and sweetness of God. An illness took him from her. How she wants to hold him again. How she wants to help this boy in need of a new name, but he is gone. What caused him to run from her? She hoped to help him, and to once again experience the joy of being near a young boy.
She can help him, or is it that he can help her? In the empty room, Rahab sighs so forcibly, the flames flutter and the shadows on the walls quiver.
Perhaps the young boy was right to run from her house. She rises and ascends to the level of the alleyway. Poking her head through the threshold of her home, she looks right and left. She closes the door and wishes she had never opened it to the young thief in need of a new name. She enters the room where they sat together. There is a peaceful, pastoral scene, but like the boy, she does not see it. She sees only the shattered cup and spilled tea.
Bakbakkar does not dare retrace his steps. He cautiously steals back to the graveyard near a grove of olive trees where he lives. The gnarled old trees with their twisted branches and light gray bark monitor his movements. He feels their presence, and they scare him. Everything scares him.
His home is a ragged rock overhang barely large enough to shelter his body. From beneath its cover, he looks across the Kidron Valley to the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. Born in a grotto, he now lives in one, a miniature cave without furnishings or love where his dark, starless thoughts shroud him more completely than a stormy night.
He is alone. He trusts no one, and his distrust makes him even more alone. His only companions are his thoughts and his fear, his only possessions the clothes he wears, the bread he steals and the dates and bread given to him by a woman grieving for her son, a woman he not only failed to thank for the food she shared with him, but for saving his hand.
He blatantly took her food and dishonored her son. He sensed her pain when she spoke of her child, but it meant little to him. He has his own pain, and he carries a burden of guilt greater than the stealing of bread or the taking without thanks of food from a grieving woman. His feelings about his past actions are building a wall between him and humanity, between him and his God, between him and any possibility of peace and a life of love and joy. He will forget her and do what he always does—think about himself and his need to survive.
Two months before, Bakbakkar approached the Holy City as a reluctant member of a caravan. He did not know the heritage of the greatest city of his land, a city of kings, High Priests and a mysterious God hidden in a temple as He once was hidden in cave. More than a thousand years before Jerusalem was ruled by Rome, it was called Salem, and its mysterious priest king, Melchezedek, received the first tithe of Abraham. Melchezedek blessed this refugee from Ur of the Chaldees, the patriarch destined to become the father of a great nation.
King David who made Jerusalem his capital recognized the strategic value of this elevated city and the Gihon Spring that provided a year round supply of water to the inhabitants of the city. The name Gihon means gushing forth and describes the nature of the city’s water supply. It does not flow continuously. Instead, the water fills a subterranean cave and when it eventually overflows the water gushes forth through cracks in the limestone and is available to the people of Jerusalem.
The city of David is perched on a ridge south of Mount Moriah, where David’s son, Solomon, built the first Temple. The Babylonians later destroyed this sacred home of the Lord God and took many of the elite of Israel into exile. When the Persians laid waste to the Babylonian empire, the wise, benevolent King Cyrus allowed captive Israelites taken to Babylon 70 years prior and their descendants to return to Jerusalem. Under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the returning refugees rebuilt their temple and the walls of Jerusalem. Those who knew the splendor of Solomon’s temple wept during the rededication of the temple, but it served to restore the sacrificial practices of a conquered and exiled people.
The walls could not hold back the military genius of the world conqueror Alexander the Great who marched through Israel on his way to the bountiful riches of Egypt. Rome followed the same route and made Palestine a vassal of its empire. King Herod, a puppet ruler appointed by Rome, petitioned to build a third temple for the Lord God. It became one of the greatest structures in the world. The weight of the Temple and adjoining structures was so great that arch supports were constructed beneath the surface of Mount Mariah to insure the stability of the third Jewish temple.
This is the temple Bakbakkar sees each morning when he wakes on the Mount of Olives. The home of the Lord God towers above Jerusalem, the city of peace, but what the city knows best is war. Bakbakkar is no soldier, but he is in conflict. He carries no knife, but he is the edge of a blade. He is no weapon, but he battles with himself. His opponent is fear. He is too young for combat, but not too young for terror. Even seeing the temple, the home of his God, brings him no peace. People from all over Israel long to see the temple of the living God and walk through its gates, but the house of the Lord God torments him. Jerusalem is not his home; it is his Babylon. He was cast out of his home and exiled here. Some think it is paradise; he regards it as Shoel.
He entered the city with a caravan through the Damascus Gate on the northern wall. Beyond the gate was an open plaza and streets leading to the market place where he immediately begged for food but found no mercy or compassion. The merchants and shoppers looked through him or turned from him when he stretched out his hand to ask for help. “Go from here, boy. You are filthy.” Another shoved him to the ground and said, “I have nothing for you, and you are nothing to me.”
Rising quickly, Bakbakkar ran blindly into a city he does not know, but he knows the words, “You are nothing to me.” These words followed him as he staggered toward the caravan that brought him to Jerusalem. He has no home, but the five words, make their home in him. He does not know how to cast them out. He demands their departure, but they sneer at him as his uncle did when he turned his back upon him and echoed the merchant’s cruelty, “You are nothing to me.”
Perhaps the Lord God of the Temple is merciful, but his people are not, so he steals to live. His mother is dead, his father is dead to him, and he lives among the dead. The graveyard is silent, too silent, and its silence makes his despondent thoughts louder.
Each day when he leaves his grotto, he takes his belongings with him. He carries little because he possesses little. The first day he entered Jerusalem from the north, but now he enters through the Dung Gate, a southern passageway where people toss their garbage. Outside the entrance is the Valley of Hinnom. The site is an abomination to the people of Israel, for in a distant past Canaanites and worshippers of Baal made their sacrifices in this valley, sacrifices that included children. Is he one of these children returned from the dead, called to return each day to the place of his death?
Fires burn perpetually in the valley. It is the city dump. When the wind comes from the south, even the massive city walls with some stones hundreds of times heavier than a man cannot shield its inhabitants from the noxious fumes of the city’s swill and dross. As he walks north into the city toward the marketplace, it takes nearly an hour for the stench of the garbage to leave his clothes.
Occasionally, he finds discarded, edible food among the garbage, but his most frequent experience is abuse from the people who live near the gate. He is alone, but he is not the only one searching for food at the Dung Gate. Men, most of them cripples or those possessed with demons forage with him. If they spy him with a morsel of food, they threaten to take it from him, and when he avoids their outstretched arms, they threw offal at him along with their foul words.
Each night is the same. He relives the injustice that brought him to Jerusalem. The anger and hatred keep him awake. It is the worst time of each day, but it is not the darkness of the night, but the darkness of his mind that steals sleep from him. Darkness is a thief, and he is like the darkness, for he, too, steals. At times anger and hatred seem willing to grant him rest, but then loneliness and fear take their turn tossing him and turning him like a lamb over the spit.
Tonight he does not sleep for another reason. Bakbakkar lay on his side with his left hand beneath his head. Looking between the trunks and branches of the olive trees he sees the shadowy form of the Temple Mount. Twinkling stars attempt in vain to cast light upon Jerusalem, but their intermittent light touches him and causes him to wonder.
Do I need a new name? If I am caught, will they cut off my hand? It is the law. How could a new name protect anyone from losing a hand? Who is this Keeper of Names? I’ve heard of him. They say he names every child. If he did give me my name, why did he call me Bakbakkar? The questions form a circle, and in its center is hope. It helps him sleep.
