I held it tightly. Had Thom given me a fireproof cord? The watertight, fireproof titanium case still hung from its black silk cord around my neck. I sat up, gasped for breath, and opened my eyes again.
The Piper Cub sat in a wigwam tangle of metal; its green-painted canvas was scorched brown and black. A bit of feeble and harmless flame continued to lick at the wreckage. A few jagged metal scraps of the exploded gas tank lay on the beach. I knew I was hurt, burned across my back and scalp, but for the moment I felt nothing but relief. And triumph. I was alive. Lucky.
Remember your name is Lucy, and Lucy is part of the word lucky. It’s always lucky just to be alive. Words my grandmother once said to me.
I sat in the water and surveyed my situation. What I saw around me seemed cut from the fabric of pure simplicity—blue sky, green sea. Unspeakably beautiful. More: my eyes glorified the sandy yellow neutrality of the beach. Cloud billows without motion hung in the blue. Lucky merely to be alive. Green water incessantly rocking like the sublime comfort of Grandmother’s soft sway. Lucky.
For a brief moment relief and beauty held pain at bay before their power dissolved. As though I and the plane were falling again, I saw an endless sea of bubbling green treetops rushing toward me. I heard again the desperate coughing of the little plane. No: I was sitting in the sea, not far from shore, coughing. Like a struck gong, my body rang with pain.
Think, my mind commanded itself.
Up there, from the air, I had seen someone, a man who might help me. Or I him. Like something discarded, he had lain on the riverbank.
Go on, inner voices commanded.
You know you can bear anything.
Where had I heard such voices? They seemed the voices of Thom’s parents—Thom, who was dead—his parents’ voices speaking from Auschwitz and Treblinka.
I must ignore the twisted wreckage of my plane. The pale beach was a blessing I must claim. I stood up in the shallow, blue-green water and took a step toward shore. I remembered the word Lascaux. A man named Pierre Saad had entrusted me with ancient, irreplaceable pages relevant to the book of Genesis, which I had thrown out the airplane door. The pain of the burn slammed against my back, and I staggered.
I shifted my feet in the slushy underwater sand to recalibrate my balance. Somehow I would reclaim the codex. My hand enclosed the memory stick.
A LIFE IN WEST JERUSALEM
THE MAN BORN as Jacob ben Ezra was an identical twin; so identical were he and his slightly younger brother that no teacher could tell them apart, and often they even succeeded in deceiving their mother. Their mother said they had knocked at the gate to the world at just the same moment, but Jacob had elbowed his way past his slightly smaller brother and so became the firstborn. Because the younger one, who was not smaller, had thicker hair on his head, he was named Esau. When they started school—two merry black-haired, brown-eyed, bright little boys—their mother tousled their hair, felt the difference, and realized that by this comparative method she would always have a way to distinguish who was who. She shared this secret with no one, not even her pious husband.
In temperament the boys seemed quite different. Esau shared his father’s interest in scriptures and memorized them with great exactness; he could recite the entirety of the book of Genesis by the time he was eight, and Exodus and Psalms, though he found the meaning of poetry more slippery than prose, by age ten. In this way, he earned his father’s special protection. Jacob’s interests were more scientific: he observed the world with focused curiosity, and when he had classified the plants and bugs of the neighborhood, he lifted his eyes to the heavens and learned about the stars of the constellations over West Jerusalem and to identify the planets. He liked math.
Jacob had one other passion discovered quite by accident: he overheard a portion of an Easter service held by touring Methodists with an American singing “Jerusalem, the Golden.” Never had Jacob heard such stirring music and beautiful tones. And this was his place, his home, celebrated in the song. The man’s voice itself was like a golden trumpet. The melody soared, yet it had a martial beat to it that made the boy want to march, then soar. Like a fanfare