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do. A back must bear the weight of heavy things. So must I.”
    At this, the Jew’s eyes opened very, very wide.
    Mustafa stood, his feet quick and happy. “Thank you,” he said. “Good-bye.” He wanted to say the word, taste it in his mouth:
kohein
. At the gate, he turned his head and saw the Jew sitting on the stoop, kneading the skin on his neck, staring after Mustafa with a puzzled expression. Mustafa scuttled away. He had got what he had come for.
Good-bye, Jew, and thanks
.

    The next day, as Mustafa coaxed peanut shells into his dustpan, he caught his image in the mosque’s glittering windows. He patted down his beard, smoothed the brown and gray coils of his hair so he didn’t look scruffy. “
Ya’allah
, Mustafa, you’re a handsome kohein, yes you are.” A kohein’s work was dirty work—all that mess of blood and entrails. A kohein couldn’t be weak or delicate. He had to be strong to hold down the animal, to insert the knife, to not fear the blood. He was picked by Allah for this work. Chosen to serve. Like a fragrant spice can change the taste of meat or good music can change the mood in an entire house, a single word had lifted him.
Kohein
.
    He speared a piece of cardboard, a sheet of a newspaper, and a baby’s sock: “Three in one blow!” he exulted. He moved stealthily between trees and rocks, between the Golden Lady shrine and the Gray Lady Al-Aqsa mosque, between groups of worshippers leaving and tourists coming, and he searched and found the stray bag, the crumpled paper, the half-eatencookie. His arms were strong, knotted with muscles. He was a warrior, he was serving Allah. His crooked head was a perfect camouflage. No one expected him to lunge and spear when he did.
    “ ‘Who will ascend the mountain of God?’ asks King David the psalmist.” An Israeli tour guide was speaking in English to a group of tourists looking up at the magnificent dome of the Golden Lady. “ ‘… those who have clean hands and a pure heart.’ ” Mounds of curly hair sprouted from the tour guide’s head. He always began his talk with that same line, Mustafa remembered. “Here stood the ancient Jewish Temple that was destroyed more than two thousand years ago. The outer western wall is all that remains from the temple. Who knows the many names this wall goes by?”
    “The Western Wall,” promptly answered a fat Jew in baggy shorts to the knee.
    “The Kotel!” called out a tall woman in a straw hat who got a nod from the guide for giving the wall its Hebrew name, but then the group fell silent, out of names.
    “No more?” He wagged a finger. “You haven’t been listening well. The Wailing Wall! Didn’t you see all those Hassidics crying down there?” He mimed tears streaming down his tanned cheeks.
    The tourists cast sheepish looks at one another.
    “And there’s one more name.” The guide let a pause fall. “The Waiting Wall,” he said with a flourish. “It’s been waiting the past two thousand years to be rebuilt. Or maybe,” he said with a certain slyness, “because it’s been waiting centuries for you and you and you”—his finger swung from person to person—“to leave your fancy homes in Scarsdale and Paris to come pray at her side!” He took a drink from his army canteen. “After all, it’s considered the holiest, most preferred spot to pray in the world.”
    Mustafa bent down and picked off a web of gum pasted on his shoe and shook his head. How angry his boss would be to find gum.
    “This rock is the place where Jewish tradition says that Abraham brought Isaac and prepared to sacrifice him, to demonstrate his devotion to God,” the guide said, brushing a dark lock of hair off his forehead. “When an angel of God stopped him, Abraham took a ram caught in the bushes and sacrificed it instead.”
    An old woman with binoculars raised an arm. “Don’t the Muslimshave the same tradition, but they say it was Ishmael who was brought to be sacrificed and not