When Baldwin didn't respond, Daniel added, "Perhaps I'm not speaking clearly. My English-"
"Your English is just fine," said Baldwin, smiling sourly.
Daniel returned the smile. "I had an excellent teacher," he said, then looked at his watch. Flipping over his note pad, he began to write. Several more moments passed.
"All right," said Baldwin, "but let's try to keep it quick."
He turned on his heel, and Daniel followed him under the arch and across the silent courtyard. A lizard scampered up the trunk of the big oak and disappeared. Daniel breathed in deeply and the aroma of roses settled moistly in his nostrils. Like a cool spray of syrup, filtered through the hot, morning air.
The hospital had a history. Daniel had learned about it in '67, during training with the 66th, when rumors of war caused every paratroop officer to study his maps and his history books.
The Amelia Catherine had begun its life as a private residence-a great, lumbering manse at the crest of the watershed between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean.
Conceived by a wealthy German missionary as a wedding present for his young bride and named for her, the estate had been fashioned of native limestone and marble by the hands of local masons. But its plans had been drawn up in Munich by an Anglophile architect and the result was a self-conscious display of Victoriana transported to Palestine-oversized, decidedly snobbish, surrounded by formal gardens replete with boxwood hedges, beds of flowers, and velvet lawns that perished quickly in the Judean heat. The missionary was also a man of high taste, and he shipped over tinned meats and preserved delicacies, bottles of French wine stored in cavernous cellars beneath the mansion.
The object of all this architectural affection, a frail blond fraulein of twenty-one, contracted cholera two months after her arrival in Jerusalem and was dead three weeks later. After burying her near the Grove of Gethsemane, the grieving widower found himself shaken by a crisis of faith that sucked him back to Europe, never to return, abandoning his dream house to the ruling Ottomans.
The Turks had always entertained a disdain for Jerusalem and its structures and, during four centuries of reign, had transformed it from a teeming Crusader shrine into a dusty, disease-ridden, provincial village, home to beggars, lepers, and fanatic Jew-infidels. From the moment its foundation had been laid, the Amelia Catherine had been an affront to their world view-that a Christian-infidel should be allowed to build something so vulgar as a house for a woman, a house that looked down upon the mosques of AI Aqsa and the Rock, was a grievous insult to Allah.
Heavy taxes collected from the German fool had kept these religious reservations at bay. But once he was gone, the gardens were ordered fallow, the lawns burned, the great house transformed to a military warehouse. Soon, the stink of machine grease emanated from every marble corridor.
That state of affairs endured until 1917, when the British invaded Palestine. The debased mansion on Scopus was strategically located and its begrimed windows witnessed many a long bloody battle. When the gunfire died, on December 11, General Allenby was marching into Jerusalem and the Ottoman Empire was a thing of the past.
The British welcomed themselves with a ceremony of exceptional pomp-one that amused the poor Jews and Arabs whose families had inhabited the city for centuries-and like every conquering horde before them, the new rulers lost no time refurbishing the Holy City to their taste, starting with the Amelia Catherine.
Crews of workmen were ordered to scythe through ankle-ripping coils of weeds; limestone was abraded to its original blush; cisterns were emptied, cesspools drained and relined. Within weeks, suitably impressive headquarters for the British military governor had been created and the genteel mix of small talk and the clatter of teacups could be heard on the veranda.
In 1947 tensions between Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs began boiling over. The British lost their taste for empire building and quickly pulled up stakes. Fighting broke out, followed by a cease-fire and a United Nations partition that created a jigsaw solution: The land was divided into six sections, with the southern and northern coastal regions and the heartland, including Jerusalem and most major cities, granted to the Arabs. The Jews received a strip of central coastline, an inland wedge of Galilee, and the barren Negev desert. Though they'd been deeded the lion's share of natural resources, the Arabs were dissatisfied with less than everything and, in 1948, attacked the Jews. Thousands of lives and one armistice later found the Jewish portion, now called Israel, enlarged to include the entire western section of Palestine but still smaller than the Arab portion, now called Jordan, which encompassed both sides of the Jordan River and spread to the east.
Faulty prophecy left Jerusalem bizarrely divided. The Holy City had been carved up hastily on November 30, 1948, during a temporary cease-fire. The process of division was an unceremonious exercise conducted in an abandoned building in the Musrara slum by the Jewish commander, a lieutenant colonel named Moshe Dayan, and the Arab commander, a lieutenant colonel named Abdullah Tal.
Neither Dayan nor Tal thought the truce would last and both considered their efforts temporary. The Jews hoped for a permanent peace treaty with their cousins, and Abdullah Tal still harbored fantasies of conquest, having boasted only days before of riding into Jewish Jerusalem on a white horse.
They went to work, using soft, waxy pencils-Dayan's red, Tal's green-on a 1:20,000 scale map of Jerusalem, drawing crude, arbitrary lines that corresponded to a land width of 50 meters. Lines that expanded as the wax melted, cutting through the centers of homes and backyards, shops and offices, splitting the city like Solomon's baby. Lines that didn't deserve serious attention because they were nothing more than transitory sketches.
But the commanders were sectioning a land that devours its prophets, where the only consistency is surprise. As the days stretched out, cease-fire matured to armistice, sketches became international borders, the space between the wax, a no-man's-land for nineteen years.
Due to its strategic value, Mount Scopus had been divided earlier, turned into a demilitarized zone administered by the United Nations. Israel retained the ruins of Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University; the eastern slope, housing the battered Amelia Catherine, was assigned to Jordan. All buildings on both sides of the mountain lay vacant and unused, though minimal patrols were permitted, the weeds were kept trimmed, and Arabs farmers were allowed, illegally, to plough the fields surrounding the Amelia Catherine and grow truck crops.
In 1967 the Arabs attacked again and, once again, lost honor and land. Jerusalem fell under exclusive Jewish rule for the first time in more than three thousand years and Scopus was unified. The Amelia Catherine entered its fifth metamorphosis, as a hospital, operated jointly by the U.N. and a Swiss-based group of Protestant missionaries.