“I was,” he said, tears filling his eyes. “We were in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. I went to the bathroom. It was in the back. I was washing my hands when the bomb went off. I was covered with plaster and shards of glass. My arm was broken. My head was bleeding. I finally crawled out of the rubble and found the entire front section of the restaurant blown to pieces.”
“It must have been awful,” Bennett said.
Dr. Kwamee nodded. “I’d never seen anything like it. Blood everywhere. Broken glass. I searched desperately for my parents. They’d been sitting at a table near the front. It took a few minutes to climb through all the bodies and pieces of the collapsed ceiling, but I finally got to them.”
“Were they already dead?”
“My father was. My mother was still breathing. She was bleeding profusely. There was a big blade — a cooking knife of some kind — stuck in her chest. I just stood there. I could see she was dying. But I didn’t know what to do. I froze. Eventually, I held her in my arms. I was sobbing and screaming for help, but no one came. No one could hear me. And then just like that, she was gone.”
The two men drove in silence for a few miles. Then Bennett asked, “Is that why you became a doctor?”
The man nodded. They drove another few miles in silence before he said, “I never went back to the mosque. I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand why Muslims were killing Muslims. And then I found my birth certificate, in with some of my parents’ papers. It said I was a Jew. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what that meant or how it could be. But something inside me told me it was true, and it was time to learn about my heritage.”
“So what did you do?” Bennett asked.
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” Dr. Kwamee replied. “I was all alone. My older brother had died of malaria. My younger brother died during childbirth. Most of my aunts and uncles were killed in the civil war. My one surviving uncle was still pretending to be a devout Muslim. He had taken me on the hajj, for crying out loud. There was no one to teach me what it meant to be Jewish. I finally decided to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic. I didn’t know what I believed. I just knew I couldn’t be a Muslim and I had no idea what it meant to be a Jew. But I did have a cousin in Nairobi. He was ten years older than me, but he was always very nice to me when I was growing up. He left for university when I eight, but he came back in the summers to visit, and he’d take me swimming and rock climbing and what have you. He even taught me to drive one summer. So I called him. I begged him to let me come live with him, and he finally relented.”
“Was he a Muslim, or at least pretending to be one?” Bennett asked.
“No, no,” Dr. Kwamee said. “Well, I assumed so. I’d never thought to ask. But when I got there, I found that he had become a follower of Jesus.”
48
Bennett hadn’t seen that one coming.
“How’d you feel about that?” he asked.
“Honestly, Mr. Bennett, I didn’t understand it at all, and at that age, I wasn’t much interested. I just needed a stable, safe place to live. My cousin was an emergency room physician at a large hospital in Nairobi. He wasn’t making a lot of money — not by American or Israeli standards, of course — but he told me if I got good grades, he would help me pay for college. I’d never been real focused in high school. But I was so grateful, I studied harder than I’d ever imagined. I wanted to make my cousin proud.”
“I’m sure he’s very proud of you,” Bennett said. “Is he still in Nairobi?”
“No, sir.”
“Where is he now?”
Kwamee didn’t answer for several minutes. The tension in the vehicle was suddenly palpable. Bennett was sorry he had asked. But after a while, Kwamee said at last, “He died in the firestorm.”
Bennett listened in silence.
“He’d gone back to Ethiopia last summer for a few months to help start an orphanage for children whose parents had died of AIDS. I got an e-mail from him in October. He said he felt something terrible was about to happen. He wanted to stay and help. And then…”
A flash of lightning lit up the car. Thunder boomed directly overhead.
“It was the last I ever heard from him. I cabled the Mossad station chief in Addis Ababa, asked him to check on my cousin. It took a few months, but I finally got confirmation recently that he didn’t make it.”
“I’m so sorry, Dr. Kwamee,” Bennett said.
They drove in silence for another few minutes. Bennett took another sip of water and watched the driving rain pelt the windshield in front of him as he tried to process this man’s story. And then, almost before he realized what he was doing, he asked, “Dr. Kwamee?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Bennett.”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Of course, please.”
Bennett hesitated. He knew it was a very personal question. But the man was baring his soul. He clearly wanted to talk. And how much time did they have left anyhow?
“Are you really convinced there is no God?”
Dr. Kwamee cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t think so. Not after my parents died. How could there be?”
There was another long pause.
“And now?” Bennett asked.
Dr. Kwamee didn’t turn to look at him. He kept his eyes fixed on the road and swallowed hard. “After the Day of Devastation, you mean?”
“Yes,” Bennett said.
“It is very difficult,” Kwamee confessed.
“Why is that?” Bennett asked.
“Because I don’t want to believe in God,” the man replied. “I am very angry with Him.”
“Because of your parents.”
“Because of my parents. Because of my brothers. My cousin. My whole family. There has been so much death, so much killing, so much sadness. It makes no sense. If God is love and joy and peace and happiness, why am I not experiencing any of it? And yet, what am I supposed to do now?”
“What do you mean?” Bennett asked.
“I mean, I felt the earthquake. I saw the hailstorm. I saw the fire fall from heaven. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw what it hit, and what it didn’t.”
“And?”
“And it’s very clear to me now that there is a God,” Kwamee said, staring straight ahead at the road as more lightning flashed and more rain fell. “It’s clear to everyone, isn’t it? And He is not the god of the Koran. He is not the god of the Buddhists or the Hindus. He is most definitely the God of the Bible. Now it’s not a matter of whether I believe He exists. I do.”
“Then what is it a matter of?”
“It’s a matter of whether I want to be His follower.”
“What holds you back?”
“Fear.”
“Fear?” Bennett asked, not sure if he had heard correctly.
“Yes,” Dr. Kwamee said.
“Of what?” Bennett asked.
“Fear that Jesus—Yeshua—might actually be the Messiah.”
“Why does that frighten you?”
Kwamee said nothing.
“It’s okay,” Bennett assured him. “You can be honest with me.”
Kwamee seemed to think about that for a moment, and then said, quite bluntly, “The truth is, Mr. Bennett, I don’t want to believe.”
That was honest, Bennett thoughT — dangerous, but honest. “Why not?” he asked.
Kwamee shrugged. “It’s many things. Partly, I just don’t want to change who I am, you know? Following Jesus means giving up a lot of stuff… stuff I like… stuff I don’t like to be told not to do; you know what I mean?”
Bennett nodded. He knew all too well.
“And…”
“And what?” Bennett asked, even more curious now.