The Pure

filled with . . . I don’t know. It fills me with energy.’ Her voice changed, became softer, lower, almost hypnotic. ‘This is what we were born for,’ she continued. ‘I’ve never been one for religion. But this? This is our time.’ She moved closer and Uzi sat forward to meet her. ‘We’re like gods.’
    For a moment neither of them moved; the sound of the engine filled the space between them. Then Leila grabbed him and pulled his mouth to hers, as if his soul were buried somewhere deep inside him and she was trying to devour it.

 
40
    The stopover in Istanbul went smoothly and they were on the final leg of the flight. Everything was quiet. Lulled by the hum of the engine, Uzi tipped back his chair and tried to get some sleep. He was only hours away from the crescendo, yet he felt strangely at peace here at the tip of the aeroplane, with nothing but air and cloud for miles in every direction. The temperature in the cockpit was cool; the air felt fresh and pure. His mind drifted and settled, but did not succumb to sleep completely. Through the haze of semi-consciousness, he found himself winding back through his memories and arriving twenty years before, in the blackness of the pre-dawn night on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. He was eighteen years old, and had just completed his Tironut, basic training. His unit had formed into single file, and each man carried a loaded weapon and backpack with full kit, and held a flaming torch aloft. He glanced up and saw his bolus of flame blazing into the eternity of the night above him, a single point in a chain of thirty torches; thirty soldiers trained and willing to die for their country. Through the darkness they marched hard up the impossibly steep Snake Path, sweat blooming on their foreheads; they were at the peak of physical fitness, both mental and physical, and their minds were set on reaching the top.
    The string of flaming torches wound its way higher and higher up the mountain, every step filled with grinding determination. They were climbing the vast rock plateau of Masada, a place of potent symbolism for Israel. In 72 AD , during the first Jewish–Roman war, a community of Jewish warriors known as the ‘Dagger Men’ had taken refuge in the fortress at the summit. Flavius Silva’s army laid siege, and by constructing a vast ramp of earth and stone they were able to march up to the fortress walls and penetrate them with a battering ram. But they found nothing but dead bodies. The Jews – 960 of them – had put themselves to the sword rather than fall prey to the enemy. Now every unit in the Israeli Army held a night-time passing-out ceremony in the ancient Masada fortress.
    It was a long march, but Uzi and his comrades were so focused it seemed to pass in no time at all. This was their moment. Chests heaving, they formed into a square; the blue and white flag was raised; and the ceremony began.
    Uzi would never forget the feeling of standing there in the orange flicker of the torches, shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow men. Now, in the cockpit of the plane, he felt light, unfettered, free. Nothing was pulling him down, nothing was restricting him; his body felt almost translucent, as if it were formed of some sort of rainbow. But that night on the summit of Masada, with his boots on the ground where those Jewish warriors spilled their own blood centuries before, he had felt wholly rooted in the earth. No, not just rooted in the earth – more than that. He felt part of the earth. As if the great boulders and dust and silt of the Holy Land had thrown out a man-shaped Golem; as if the bloodstained earth of his forefathers had come alive in him. His skeleton was made of holy rock, packed over with Dead Sea mud; his eyeballs were crystallised globes of salt, and within the grooves of his veins flowed the lava of Jewish pride. For this was the land of his birthright, this was the substance of his inheritance, in equal parts cursed and blessed. And when the ceremony drew to its final, rousing conclusion, and he opened his mouth alongside all his brothers, their teeth glinting like chips of marble in the gloom, the sound that came out was the thunder of a thousand earthquakes: Masada shall never fall again! Masada shall never fall again!
    Uzi slipped towards the surface of consciousness, and found that the Kol was speaking to him. It was saying something about Qum and Natanz, something about