LITMIR.BIZ

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Ramallah and Jerusalem squeezed into shared taxis, with Theo strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. We carried him about the West Bank with a little black-and-white checked Palestinian kaffiyah that Munir Nasir had given us wrapped around his neck.

      Our apartment overlooked the route that Glock took on his last day, from the Institute to the al-Farabi house. To my left, as I stood on the balcony, and just outside my field of vision, was the old town of Bir Zeit, the old campus, the Institute of Archaeology, and the Greek Orthodox church where the funeral took place on the day of the murder. Closer was the stretch of pavement onto which Glock pulled over and waited to allow the procession to pass by. Before me, and occupying most of the view, was a vista of rocky hills. In the distance, on the opposite hill, were the refugee camp of Jalazun, and above it the Israeli settlement Beit El, and to the right of them, on the horizon, the blinking radio masts of Ramallah. The panorama encompassed most of the area in which the events of the day of the murder took place. To the right were the rooftops of the centre of the town of Bir Zeit. Beyond the town stretched the road to Ramallah and, invisible where I stood, the al-Farabi house, in the driveway of which Glock was shot. Below, across the street, was a municipal trash dumpster which at night attracted feral cats, and by day jangled the nerves as people banged its metal doors open and shut; behind it lay a group of neglected olive trees standing in a clutter of soda bottles.

      Lying open on the tiled floor in the hall was a partially unpacked suitcase containing a stack of papers: Glock’s correspondence, diaries, published and unpublished articles, the available documentation of his life, his work and his death. On a trip to the United States six months earlier, my first step in investigating the shooting, I had been to see Glock’s widow, Lois, and she had let me copy the papers and computer disks in her late husband’s enormous personal archive.

      The documents conjured up the ghost of the murdered archaeologist. I read and re-read the material, and my virtual acquaintance with Albert Glock deepened. Sometimes I would forget that I never knew him, that five years separated our experience of this weary little town. I came to see him in my mind’s eye like the memory of an old friend. His life was an enigma, not least because his work as an archaeologist never reached completion. To me, he existed as a holographic image in a swarm of facts, but within this mass of data one pattern stood out clearly, like stars forming a constellation: a trajectory of purpose, vivid and irresistible. Glock’s life had been a mission. He had obeyed the severe demands of his conscience, and put the fulfilment of its imperatives before anything else in his life, and he had followed it unswervingly to the extreme and solitary point where a violent death closed in on him.

      In the evenings I would sit on the balcony, eating grilled chicken from the restaurant across the road, looking out over the activity in the street below, and think that I was attempting the impossible, to know the unknowable, to capture the atoms of a moment that had passed five years ago. All societies have secrets that an outsider will never penetrate, and this was one held by no more than a handful of people, who would not tell me even if I could find them. The headlights of passing cars – the Mercedes taxis and battered pickup trucks – would illuminate me for a moment where I sat. The town looked peaceful enough, yet just down the road, outside the post office where I bought my first Yasir Arafat postage stamps, there were terrible scenes during the intifada, of people of all ages confronting the military force of the dominant Israelis, getting beaten and shot and tear-gassed. Now in the same place, four years after the Oslo Agreement had introduced limited Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories, the precarious truce between Israel and Palestine was symbolized by groups of young Palestinian Authority policemen, strolling about with nothing better to do than check the licences of the taxis that plied the two kilometres to the Birzeit campus. The moment of the murder was lost and buried; it was now ancient history.

      I had a copy of the autopsy in my suitcase. After Glock was shot, his body was taken to the Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, outside Tel Aviv, and kept on ice overnight. The pathologist noted that the body was dressed in grey trousers, blue underwear, brown shoes and dark blue socks. One lens of his glasses was missing, and his stomach contained a porridgy material: the ka’ak simsim Glock had partly eaten earlier that day. The body showed the wear and tear that would be expected of a man of Glock’s age. His heart was in good condition. His lungs were a bit grey from smoking.

      One bullet entered the back through the right shoulder, passed through the right lung, the heart and the liver, and exited through the lower ribs on the left-hand side. Another bullet entered under the right cheekbone (‘zygomatic bone’), passed through the skull and the brain and came out on the left-hand side of the neck. The paths of both bullets sloped downwards, which indicated that the gunman had fired from a position higher than his victim. This made sense: Glock was walking down a slope at the time, and the gunman fired from the top of the slope. A third bullet entered his right shoulder from the front and emerged at the back of the body. This third bullet was fired from below to above, indicating it was shot at a different angle, that the body was in a different position when this bullet entered. The entry and exit wounds were clean – ‘no marks of powder burn, soot and/or fire effect’ – which shows that the gunman was not using hollow-pointed bullets. Hollow-pointed bullets expand on impact and leave messy wounds as they pass through. They tend to be used by police officers because they bring the victim down quickly. The absence of these markings suggests that a military-type weapon was used: military weapons fire solid bullets, which leave clean exit and entry wounds.

      It is hard to tell for sure which bullet was fired first, but the gunman may have fired first at Glock’s back, as he was walking down the concrete slope. This shot – which entered the right shoulder – then turned him around slightly, so that the bullet fired the next instant hit his right cheek. Glock fell forwards, onto his face, onto the concrete, wounding his nose and forehead. Then – and this depends on how much time elapsed between the first two shots and the last – Glock turned over where he lay, with his feet towards the gunman, and his head away from him, and the killer fired a final bullet into Glock’s right shoulder before he made his escape in the waiting car. Either he turned over in a spasm, or the gunman got close enough to turn him over, and then fired a last shot. The first alternative seems more likely. Glock was found lying on his back, with grazes on his face.

      The pathologist estimated that the bullets were fired from a distance of about one metre.

       THREE

      NOT MANY PEOPLE at Birzeit knew it, but besides being an archaeologist Albert Glock was also a Lutheran minister and a missionary. It was a fact that he preferred not to draw attention to. Being a minister was an aspect of himself that he had been gradually shedding in the last years of his life. He didn’t like people to know that while he was teaching archaeology at Birzeit his salary was being paid by his church back in the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The word missionary oppressed him like a nightmare.

      He could no longer believe what he used to believe. In his dedication to Birzeit, where he had taught for sixteen years and established the university’s archaeology programme, the first at a Palestinian university, he had developed a heretical personal theology from which faith and hope had been eliminated, and all that remained was an austere, angry and self-sacrificing Christian love. His decades of living in the land of the Bible had turned him into a dissident against the biblical God his Lutheran education had given him, whose interventions in human affairs the Bible traditionally described: for he had discovered that what he had thought of in his younger days as the land of the Bible was in reality the land of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the scene of a century of hatred, injustice and bloodshed. Over the years, he had turned his back on the discipline he had first come to Palestine to practise – biblical archaeology – and undergone a profound personal transformation into a totally different kind of scholar: still an archaeologist, but one who applied his skill to uncovering an alternative history of Palestine, a history derived from archaeological facts, rather than from the biblical narrative. This meant, in effect, a history not of ancient Israel but of the Palestinians. It was a view that set him against many of his former professional colleagues in archaeology, and against his own background.

      It

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