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she walked to the parking lot and drove the few miles from the Jerusalem Hospital in the direction of the center of the city until she reached the Israel Museum. She could have left it for a couple of days until she had more time, but she was anxious to see her grandfather again, and the object she’d taken from Bilal’s hand gave her the perfect opportunity to go to the museum.
    Even though she had lunch and dinner with her grandfather regularly, she missed his gentle ways, his wisdom, his knowledge. And especially his link to her grandmother. Judit had died whenYael’s own mother was a baby, killed by snipers when Israel was first declared a state in 1948. Yael loved hearing his stories of the old days in Russia and Germany, his work founding a kibbutz, and his training in archaeology.
    She wondered what the precious stone was; she’d never have taken it to the museum had it not been for the inscription, which she recognized as ancient Hebrew writing. As she walked from the parking lot, she saw to her right the extraordinary building that housed the Dead Sea Scrolls, the roof of which was created in the shape of one of the ancient jars in which an Arab smuggler in the last days of the British mandate in 1947 had discovered the greatest treasury of biblical Jewish writings. There was a time when she would have loved little more than walking around the Shrine of the Book and the grounds of the museum. But that was a different Yael, a different life.
    After passing through the metal detector and having her bag searched, Yael walked to the reception desk and announced, “I have an appointment with the director, Professor Shalman Etzion. My name is Yael Cohen.”
    The receptionist looked down at her list and saw Yael’s name. She smiled and nodded, then phoned through to the director’s office. “Do you know the way?” she asked, and Yael nodded. She knew the way very well, as she had visited her grandfather here on many occasions.
    Walking down the corridors, up the stairs, and along passage-ways, she breathed in the perfumes of the ages. This wasn’t public territory; the men and women who worked in these offices were working on stones and clothes, woods and metals, papers and parchments and all other types of things that hadn’t seen the light of day for thousands of years. She felt strangely nostalgic but quickly dismissed it as whimsy.
    As she walked purposefully down the upper corridor, she heard a deep baritone voice behind her.
    â€œMs. Cohen? Yael?”
    She turned to see a short, gray-haired Palestinian in a dusty cardigan. For a moment Yael didn’t recognize him, but distant memories from her youth enabled her to remember the man’s name.
    â€œMustafa?”
    The old man smiled and gave a short single nod of his head.
    Mustafa was a museum expert on ancient Islamic arts and culture, respected throughout the world for his knowledge, and often appeared on television panel shows dealing with cultural issues. But to Yael in that moment he was an awkward and distant memory from childhood: a man her grandfather, Shalman, knew, a friend from times long gone, times of which her grandfather rarely spoke. They had visited Mustafa and his wife, Rabiya, when she was a child. She had played with their children. But that was a long time ago, and a lot of bullets and bombs separated that time from now. And Mustafa had told Yael, many years ago, about how Shalman had changed his life, about his sponsorship and encouragement of Mustafa’s love of archaeology. How Shalman had fought to have Mustafa accepted into the university and how he’d become a top-grade student. But rarely did the two men talk about the old days, no matter how much she pressed them to do so.
    Yael looked at Mustafa and thought that perhaps she should hug him, kiss him on the cheek as she might have done as a child. But she didn’t. Childhood was her past, and the man before her was no longer a