The Shahid's Widow

by Danny Bar

  “People have seen her going about at nights.”

  “Ballah?For real?” asked a young passenger and opened her eyes widely.

  “Yes, and she was seen in Bethlehem too.”

  “Allah knows what she’s looking for there.”

  “God forbid!” said another and spat three times into her cleavage.

  “Tell me, why is she spending so much time in the pharmacy? There’s only one thing that I can think of…”

  “Halas, enough girls! If words could kill you’d have turned her into a corpse already,” A’ysha scolded them and immediately received furious responses.

  “You can’t see the truth,” they reprimanded her, “everyone is staying clear of her as if she was made of fire. Who knows what she’s scheming?”

  “Even the Palestinian Authority has been asking about her,” said one of the women.

  “Really?” the rest of the women asked with amazement, “how do you know that?”

  “People talk…” she remained vague.

  “Enough, here she comes,” A’ysha shushed them.

  “Sabah al khair,” good morning, Yasmina greeted them as she boarded the bus and took her seat.

  “What happened?” asked Samia, the youngest of the group. She was not yet sixteen, but her father had already sent her to help provide for the family, “we’ve been waiting for ten minutes, they’ll deduct it off our salaries because of you.”

  “Sorry, I’ve had a rough morning,” she apologized, but they would not let go.

  “We all have our bad mornings. Like they say, ‘yom asal, yom basal.’ Life alternates, a day of honey, a day of onions.”

  “Maybe with her it was a day of cucumbers,” said Samia and the girls burst into a wild laughter.

  Yasmina ignored their words. Her mind was preoccupied with other things. She was so lost in her own thoughts, actually, that she had almost forgotten to deliver Jamil’s letter. She rushed to do it at the last moment, before her break was over. The butcher was not in his shop and she preferred to keep the letter in her pocket rather than handing it to the man working there, although he had pleaded with her to do so.

  At four in the afternoon, she hurried to the station.

  “Your eyes are aglow,” Khalil told her when he noticed her strange look as they drove together in his car. The destination was obvious for both of them. Khalil stopped at the entrance of a stone house on the outskirts of Bethlehem, shaded by pine trees. Something was clearly bothering him. Yasmina asked him about it, but he brushed her off with a casual answer and she, impatient to tell him of her decision, did not burden him with further questions. As soon as they had entered the house he took her in his arms and hugged her, pressing her to him as his hands stroked her hair.

  “You’re beautiful, Yasmina,” he told her and kissed her forehead. Yasmina knew that unless she stopped him now, she would no longer be able to stop herself at all.

  “Just a moment, ya habibi,” she told him and released herself from between his arms.

  “Khier insha’allah? What happened?”

  “Do you remember telling me you are working with the Mukhabarat?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I want to meet Abu Ghazall.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, but on one condition: I will provide him only with information about Jamil and no one else.”

  “When did you decided to do that?”

  “Last night,” she answered.

  “He was with you,” he determined and both his hands clenched into fists.

  “He didn’t do anything, ya habibi,” she tried to calm him down. But it was in vain, Khalil was furious.

  “I’ll break every bone in his body,” he said angrily.

  “I didn’t let him touch me,” she embraced his head and placed it on her chest. Khalil inhaled the sweet scent that rose from between her breasts and closed his eyes.

  “When will you have us meet?” she asked, trying to overcome her desire.

  “Tomorrow,” he answered, his head still buried in her chest.

  “Where,” her questions shortened as her breathing quickened.

  “I’ll call him to ask soon,” he promised her without raising his face.

  “Do it now,” Yasmina insisted and pushed his head.

  Khalil grunted, took his cell phone and called.

  “Abu Ghazall, please,” he told the district secretary. Moments later, he heard Amos’ voice.

  “We’ll have a visitor tomorrow,” he told him.

  Yasmina clearly saw the joy on his face when he heard Abu Ghazall’s reaction.

  “All right, seven pm at the hotel,” he repeated aloud and looked at Yasmina who gave him a wide smile of satisfaction.

  “Come,” he told her cheerfully, “we’ll go and buy you something to wear to the meeting.”

  The vendor at the luxurious Aphrodite clothing store in Bethlehem welcomed Yasmina heartily. She suggested that she buy a pair of brown pants and a cream-colored shirt that gave her an elegant, yet modest look. From there they continued to the shoe store and left fifteen minutes later holding two large shopping bags.

  “The last thing I need right now is for the village women to see me dressed like this,” she told him when she looked one last time in the mirror before leaving for their meeting at the hotel. She was obviously not accustomed to wearing such clothes. It was a look that perfectly fit her. Her beauty, normally concealed between the folds of the village dresses, was now fully visible. It seemed that she, too, appreciated her image in the mirror. She stood in front of it, marveling at her own image in disbelief.

  At the entrance to the hotel, Yasmina stared at the many brilliant lights like a child enchanted with wonderland. She had never visited hotels before, and this was the grandest hotel in Tel Aviv. Her heart fluttered with excitement at the thought of the coming meeting with the Shin Bet officer. Many other thoughts went through her head in the elevator. She realized the step she was about to take was a desperate one, and that it would have many implications on her life.

  The elevator rose past the fourth floor. Her heart beat wildly in her chest and she tightened her grip on Khalil’s arm while he softly smiled at her.

  Khalil seemed to have been reading her thoughts. He looked at her with loving eyes, “Yasmina, are you sure you want to meet him?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, “the moment Jamil threatened to hurt those closest to me, he sealed his own fate. To protect them, I am willing to cooperate, even with the devil himself.”

  “You will soon meet him and see with your own eyes that he is far from being a devil.”

  “Yes, but I will be helping those who hurt my own people.”

  “You won’t be acting against your own people, Yasmina, on the contrary, you have sacrificed your husband on the altar of the struggle for freedom. But as the saying goes, ‘I and my brother against my cousin, but I and my cousin against the enemy,’ and this time, your enemy is Jamil. To act against him you need the help of your ‘cousin’, Abu Ghazall.”

  “You know as well as I do that such arguments will be useless if we are caught. No one would be willing to accept that we have cooperated with the devil. We would pay for it with our lives.”

  “Are you having second thoughts?” Khalil asked her.

  “No, the freedom of my body is as sacred in my eyes as the freedom of our people.”

  Khalil smiled at her with visible excitement on his face.

  The elevator door opened. Yasmina tightened her grip on his hand and they walked toward room 1232 and lightly knocked on the door. Abu Ghazall welcomed them with a wide smile, “Ahlan, ahlan”!” he called aloud.

  Yasmina smiled and with a slight hesitation reached with her hand to shake his.

  “Tfadali,” he directed her to the wide armchair in the center of the
room. It was only then that he turned to The Magic Flute who sat on a sofa. Yasmina remained standing and closely examined the room.

  “What can I offer you to drink?” Abu Ghazall asked her.

  “Tea,” she answered shyly and sat on the sofa beside Khalil.

  “Ahlan, ahlan,” he greeted her again to try and overcome the embarrassment of the first few moments. Gradually, they began to talk, conducting a hesitant casual conversation. Yasmina occasionally stole a glance at Khalil, as if seeking his approval to answer.

  A knock suddenly sounded at the door, “Room service,” called someone from the other end.

  Abu Ghazall waited a moment before going to the door.

  “The Magic Flute,” accustomed to the procedure, pulled Yasmina to the bathroom and locked the door, motioning for her with his hand to remain silent. They heard the door being opened, then some quick words uttered by the waiter followed by the door being slammed shut. A light tap on the bathroom door came next and The Magic Flute exited with Yasmina, who still did not understand what was happening.

  “I’m like a deaf person in a wedding ceremony,” a common saying she whispered to Khalil. Khalil burst out laughing.

  On the table rested a teapot, a bottle of beer and small sandwiches.

  Abu Ghazall hurried to pour the tea and extended Yasmina a cup. “Tfadali,’” he told her and turned to drink his coffee.

  Yasmina was mostly silent and only provided short answers to Abu Ghazall’s questions. Although The Magic Flute had told her about it, she was still surprised by how fluently Abu Ghazall spoke Arabic. At most, she thought he would speak the broken dialect used by the roadblock IDF soldiers. The factory bus driver had once mockingly told her this wasn’t the Arabic spoken in Palestine, “But I guess this is what they teach them in the army.”

  Yasmina was not the only one surprised at the meeting, Amos was surprised as well. He had already worked with female agents coming from the villages. These always wore wide dresses that erased any trace of their femininity and the marks of the hard labor that was their lot in life could clearly be seen of what was visible of their bodies.

  But the girl he was now faced with surprised him, and not just with the pants she wore. Her entire appearance spoke of female vitality, and there was intelligence behind the rebellious look in her eyes.

  They spent the first hour idly chatting.

  Yasmina found it difficult to follow the conversation, “Man’s talk,” Abu Ghazall apologized and turned to her, “I want to thank you for coming to meet me, people who are dear to Khalil are close to my heart as well.”

  “Thank you,” she smiled at him, “did Khalil tell you why I asked to see you?”

  Abu Ghazall avoided a direct answer, “I am sure it is only your wellbeing that guides him. This was why I have agreed to this meeting.”

  The Magic Flute smiled contentedly and nodded his head.

  “Ya Abu Ghazall,” Yasmina finally began to speak after a long silence, “I will not tell you the whole story so I could maintain some of my dignity, but it is the source of my motivation to meet and work with you. I have nothing against my people and I would never agree to act against them, on the contrary, I have sacrificed a man who was dear to me on the altar of the resistance against the occupation. But today we have a common enemy, Jamil, whom I would fight against even with my bare hands. So long as you do not ask me to betray any other of my own people, my conscience will be clear.”

  “I thank you for your sincere words. As Allah is my witness, we will not ask you to commit any acts that would stand against your conscience. Our goal is one and our enemy is the same: the extremists who strive to ruin the chances both our nations have for living in peace. The pain of mothers, no matter which side, is a terrible thing, one that we must act to prevent. The day will come, insha’allah, when you too will hold babies in your arms and wish for a better world they could live in.”

  “Insha’allah,” laughed Yasmina and placed her hand in Khalil’s.

  “Yasmina,” Khalil turned to her, “this man sitting in front you has never betrayed my trust. If he had, I would never have brought you here with me today. Don’t hesitate to tell him whatever is on your mind.”

  “Isn’t this what I have just done?” she smiled and looked at him softly. It was apparent she had been moved by his words. “Will you accompany me to all the meetings?”

  “No,” he laughed, “the less I know of your actions, the better for the both of us. Abu Ghazall won’t tell me anything of the content of your meetings with him, and you should do the same. That is the nature of this new world you have just entered. It is the only true guarantee of your safety, Yasmina.”

  “What would you have me do?” she asked and looked at Abu Ghazall, who was listening attentively to The Magic Flute’s words and was unable to hide his contentment.

  “Yasmina, just like Khalil has just said, you are entering a new world. It is a world whose rules are completely different from the ones you knew before and it would change you forever. You must learn to harmoniously combine this new world with the one in which you are living today, which isn’t easy. On the contrary, Yasmina, I can tell you that it can get extremely difficult.”

  “Like tightrope walking in the circus?” she asked.

  “Very much so! In both cases you need to maintain a constant state of vigilance and remain careful so that you won’t fall.”

  “What am I supposed to do then?”

  “Change old habits and adopt new ones for yourself.”

  “Like what, for example?”

  “Keeping a secret. People enjoy opening their hearts and sharing their hardships with their friends. Now you will need to face things on your own. At most, you will be able to share your difficulties with me, but with no one else, not even your own family. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, and that won’t be too difficult me for me. I am used to living on my own, in complete solitude and without sharing anything with my friends or family.”

  “Well then,” smiled Abu Ghazall, “let’s start with the fact that from now on you will have a secret codename. It will be the only name you would use when calling us on the phone. It is intended to guarantee your safety.

  Yasmina nodded. Then, over the course of the next two hours, Abu Ghazall explained to her in detail the basics of an agent’s activities. Yasmina listened attentively all that time, fascinated and occasionally stealing a glance at Khalil and smiling at him.

  “Any questions, Yasmina?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  Abu Ghazall glanced at his watch, “The hotel lobby will be emptied of guests in a little while and then you’ll have a hard time getting out without drawing attention, so we’d better finish now.”

  Yasmina gave Khalil a questioning look.

  “Is something bothering you?” asked Abu Ghazall.

  “Yes,” she smiled with embarrassment, “I brought a note Jamil had received from the butcher and threw in my home.”

  “Where is it?”

  “With me.”

  She turned her back to Amos and fished from her bra a small rolled-up note that still carried the scent of her body and handed it to him, “This is the only place no one would dare search, not even the soldiers,” she told him with embarrassment.

  Abu Ghazall took the note, opened it carefully and read:

  “In the name of Allah the great and merciful.

  Today I have welcomed a dear brother from the family on the other side. He told me that the groom has arrived from abroad yesterday and is now waiting for the right time to meet his beloved.

  Ayed.

  Abu Ghazall frowned and attempted to solve the hints in the note. He finally gave up, took a small camera from his briefcase and snapped a picture of it.

  “Take the note with you and return it to the same place where you found it, you can ne
ver know when he might ask for it.”

  She nodded. Then Abu Ghazall opened his diary and asked to coordinate their next meeting. He was concerned by the contents of the note; it seemed as though the final preparations for a suicide attack were being made. He would need to frequently meet with Yasmina.

  “Tomorrow evening?” he asked her.

  She looked at Khalil and sought his approval.

  “Fine,” The Magic Flute answered him in Hebrew. They agreed to hold the first meeting with Yasmina at one of the rendezvous apartments in Jerusalem.

  At about 11:30 pm, the meeting ended with warm handshakes. Amos walked them to the door, made sure the corridor was empty, and only then motioned for them to quickly leave the room and go to the elevator.

  “Ma’asalame,” he whispered to them next to the door and shut it behind them. Then he leaned on the door and a satisfied smile appeared on his tired face.

  “Congratulations, ya Amos,” the head of the district complimented him while raising a glass of champagne, “recruiting her was a state-of-the-art operation initiated with your daring idea of recruiting her, followed by wisely choosing ‘The Magic Flute’ to lead this move and culminating with the recruitment appointment. Let us raise a toast!”

  “Cheers,” his fellow teammates raised their champagne glasses and congratulated him as well. “Tell us about her,” they asked him.

  “She reminds me of my favorite actress, Penelope Cruz. She is a strong, intelligent woman. I would go as far as saying that she is an anomaly in her society. On the one hand, she is a farmer who has never left the confines of her village, and her world revolves around her family and village. On the other hand, when you sit in front of her, you are faced with a sharp-minded, intelligent woman. She has a fire blazing in her eyes, of the kind you see only with good agents.”

  “Sounds like working with her would pose quite a challenge,” remarked one of his friends.

  “Good luck,” said another.

  “We must be careful in adhering to the terms she presented in yesterday’s meeting and refrain from asking her to provide information about others,” said Amos and looked at the head of the district.