by Paul Usiskin
‘What about the clipping Daddy?’
‘Anyone can create a clipping on a computer and photocopier,’ he crumpled up the piece of paper and was about to toss it away, then stopped and pocketed it. It would help as kindling. Then he realized what he’d done and was silently angry with himself for responding to conditioning.
The rest of the day was like the previous one, but without the tree felling.
With Shoshi back, all four sleeping in the tent was difficult. Uri opted to sleep in the open and didn’t get much rest.
At just after three on Friday morning, they were awoken to the sounds of a jeep engine, doors slamming and amplified voices shouting, ‘Get up! Get out! Have your IDs ready!’
The Bidermans stood in front of the tent, the fence light on, frightened, shivering.
Uri spoke. ‘We don’t have our IDs. They’re in the house.’
‘Sit down and shut up!’
The Bidermans did as they were told.
An hour later, the light went out.
Later in daylight, Qassim watched the Bidermans struggle to get up and on with the day, yawning, hungry, irritable.
Ilana had improvized with water and flour to make a rough dough, which she kneaded on the upturned base of the cooking pan, before making matza-like buns that were singed and tasteless but better than nothing. The girls promised Ilana they’d never take the family Shabbat supper for granted ever again. There was not enough flour for the next day.
Uri’s secretary e-mailed asking if he wanted to postpone a meeting scheduled for that afternoon, or could the finance director sit in for him? Qassim replied as Ilana saying the meeting could go ahead without him and that the finance director should e-mail a summary afterwards.
Close to midnight the sounds of the jeep and the light woke them again. Ilana picked up the spade and threw it at the light and missed. It sailed over the stockade. The girls shouted at her. Miri screamed, ‘You stupid cow! What are we going to use for the toilet now?’
Uri slapped her. She burst into tears.
Shoshi cried.
Ilana was dumbstruck.
Qassim watched and smiled when Ilana shouted, unsure where to look, ‘What the fuck do you want from us?’
Uri went and hugged her.
Faisal turned off the light.
On Saturday morning Tima and Ismail came and escorted Miri away. Uri and Ilana looked at each other. Shoshi stared after her sister.
Ilana’s sister, Uri’s mother, and school-friends, all left messages asking how the family were doing with the flu, and received replies with varying progress reports.
There was no more food to eat and the jerry can was almost empty. By the afternoon, Uri, Ilana and Shoshi were getting that Yom Kippur fast day feeling, light headed, occasional aches behind the eyes, weary limbs.
They got into the tent and slept.
On Sunday morning Ilana left the tent first. The jerry can was half filled; tea and sugar had been left for them. She made the fire and boiled water. She kept looking around, hoping Miri would be there. Uri and Shoshi joined her, silent and sullen and each loaded their now grubby cups with sugar before adding the tea.
It began to rain, a sharp vertical shower. They huddled round the fire trying to shield it and failing and then they returned to the tent, soaked, cold and hungry.
They stayed there until dusk. Ilana emerged from the tent. Faisal turned on the fence light and she stood up. She was unwashed, bedraggled. ‘Tell me what you want. Just tell me.’
The light went out.
It went on again at two on Monday morning. ‘Out! Out! Now!’ the amplified voice shouted. The three managed to get up, heads muzzy, hearts thudding, and stood in the light. Miri appeared. She carried a shopping bag. It contained half a loaf of bread and a bottle of water. They hugged her whilst Ismail and Tima took down the tent and left.
It began to rain again, a long downpour of the first rain of the season that the earlier shower had prefaced.
The light went out.
Shoshi asked, ‘What did they tell you?’
‘His name was Anwar. He was sixteen when he was arrested for demonstrating about the route of the separation barrier. He was a bright boy, the middle son of three children, expected to go to university and be an architect. He came back four months later, a shell, with only one aim, to die and kill as many of us as he could. His mother begged him not to be a shaheed, a martyr. He made a false bomb belt with wires and went to a checkpoint wearing it and ran towards the soldiers shouting, ‘Death To The Jews!’ and they shot him, but didn’t kill him.’
Instead of a news clipping, she had been given a plastic zip file. She handed it to Uri. It was a photocopy of a Shin Bet report on Anwar’s death in hospital, complete with an autopsy. It was only one page, headed Sodi B’Yoter – Top Secret.
Qassim watched Uri read it and pass it to Ilana. As her mother read it, Miri said, ‘It says he’d been tortured after his arrest. It questions why physical harm was inflicted on someone already injured. What kind of people are we?’
Uri vaguely recalled a news story like that. ‘Who knows if Anwar was real? How would a soldier faced with a suicide bomber know the bomb belt was a fake?’ he asked his daughter.
She replied, ‘I don’t know. But I had the feeling Anwar was someone they all knew.’
Uri couldn’t meet his family’s eyes.
Miri gave the loaf to her mother who broke off pieces for everyone. It was old, but they were hungry. ‘They fed me. I’m not hungry,’ she said.
They all shared the water. Qassim had added a double dose of sedative and they were soon all asleep under a rain-clouded sky.
In the afternoon Miri awoke stiff and cold. There was a strong smell of wood smoke. A roaring sound came from the stockade; it was in flames.
Uri woke next, shaking Ilana and Shoshi. They stared frozen in fear, at the wall of flames encircling them, higher than their house. The flames warmed them. Uri saw part of the stockade had burned to the ground, and the rest alight was made of painted hardboard on wooden frames. ‘Let’s get out of this!’ he shouted.
The cattle fence and razor wire were bundled up by the orange trees. Trees? They’d watched as the trees were cut up. Ilana and the girls stood staring. There was only one orange tree cut to its stump, the trunk lopped into pieces in a small pile, fruit from it in two boxes. The rest of the grove was untouched.
‘Editing tricks,’ Uri muttered angrily.
At the house they found the boxes full of their possessions and the Chagall in bubble wrap on top of one. A typed message taped to it read, ‘Are you ABSOLUTELY sure?’
The hoo-haw of sirens from the Herzliyah fire station’s engines reached them. Uri went out onto the road. It was waterlogged and by the time the fire engines got to the house, the stockade was a large circle of ash.
Waiting for the police to arrive, Uri told his daughters, ‘Until we’ve met with the police, don’t tell anyone what happened.’
He was too late. Both girls had retrieved their cell phones and iPads and began contacting their friends. Social media worked at lightning speed and as Chief Inspector Gurwitz of Kfar Saba police arrived, the Twittersphere and Facebook were full of speculation and rumor about The Six Days of the Bidermans.
Gurwitz shut down the house as a crime scene and the Bidermans moved to Uri’s brother Ronni’s spacious Herzliyah home. Immediate family descended on them. Two press and media circuses materialized, one at their home, the other at Ronni’s. The one at their home was on both sides of the track, clogging it up and giving the MAZAP, the criminal forensic identity team, a muddy minefield of water-logged potholes, vehicles and cables to negotiate.
Ronni and Uri shouted at everyone who rang the doorbell, getting more and more hysterical until Gurwitz asked a paramedic to give Uri a sedative and ensure he took it and had the media circ
us pushed back behind portable barriers some distance from the house. Ilana stayed calm, acting out the injured heroine, and being practical by taking over Ronni’s kitchen, making coffee, answering Gurwitz’s questions.
At their house, the MAZAP team worked through every room and the backyard, poking at the remains of the once intimidating stockade.
Shoshi and Miri enjoyed their celebrity status and began arguing over who should wear what when they finally got home and then began nagging Ilana to let them go shopping for new clothes. She told them they weren’t going anywhere, collected their phones and iPads and they became instantly hysterical.
In the midst of the chaos, a psychological profiler arrived. She wore a tailored power suit and a sympathetic expression as she introduced herself to Gurwitz and asked for time to talk with the Bidermans, and only when she produced her cell phone and handed it to him saying, ‘Justice Minister Hassid wants a minute of your time,’ did Gurwitz take her seriously, listened to Hassid and asked what she needed.
‘I need to talk to them as soon as possible,’ she said, ‘not just to calm them down but to get their memories of the perpetrators while they’re still fresh.’
Gurwitz agreed. ‘Maybe we’ve a new hostage syndrome here, the Biderman syndrome?’ he asked dryly.
6
Dov’s foot ached. It was long seconds before he recognized himself in the mirror. Beneath the shaving foam he saw a longish face, sculpted straight nose, wide set bitter chocolate eyes, dark brown hair powdered with gray at the edges parted neatly on the left, a man in his mid to late forties, a hint of a paunch, or was it just posture? He straightened up. ‘Hmm,’ he said aloud, slapping his belly, giving a rare smirk. The eyes were unavoidable, intelligent, always appraising, the mien of an academic perhaps. But look closer. Eyes can be mirrors, not always windows on the soul. He’d been a police investigator, now in the seclusion of this hotel bathroom, he saw an inquisitor, one who knew no limits in the quest for truth. He headed a department of government inquisitors, whose remit was to investigate Israel Police officers. The politest policemen called the PID snoops, the crudest, fucking snakes.
But he wasn’t just a servant of the state. He was a thinking human being, who constantly challenged, starting with himself. Without asking questions and accumulating the knowledge the answers gave you, how could you progress? Socrates had taught him that not examining one’s life meant that that life wasn’t worth living. Dov certainly believed in living.
He had never understood where his analytical nature came from. His father had been a successful banker and his mother a kindergarten teacher. They were Israeli born, but children of refugees, and the Jewish gene pool was as complex and intermixed as any people’s history could be. Jews had done much wandering. He’d been a voracious reader with a powerful imagination as a boy, who as an only child learned self-sufficiency early. That made him a loner, one who chose carefully with whom he’d have intercourse, whether social or physical.
He wasn’t a solitary man, not the man closed inside himself as the 60s Israeli pop song had it, just discerning of those he allowed in. His inner voice said that’s one way of dealing with your loneliness. Liora, his wife had found her way to his heart at school. She brought out what she called his perfect imperfections. Then came the sex scandal which wrecked both career and marriage. It was the result of a honey trap in which Dov became obsessed with the call girl honey, Sara, his own private courtesan she’d once insisted, as they lay together drained after she’d practised yet again her alchemy of sex.
After video cassettes of Dov’s exploits with Sara surfaced amongst the press and media and the upper echelons of the Israel Police Force, he went from Super Cop to Super Dick. Liora divorced him. At first he was unable to pick up what was left because he didn’t think anything was.
He appreciated later that he’d sublimated his natural need for revenge for what had happened by blaming everyone else for it. Was there perhaps some residual grudge? Didn’t he wonder looking back why he’d been honey-trapped, or used by his predecessor, or placed in Hassid’s limelight so the Minister would know where he was, so on. He’d never thought about the past in terms of grudges. Had he, he would have been like everyone else living in a country with an undefinable future, life so often uncertain that uncertainty had become part of the nation’s DNA, and people pushed it away and somehow got on with their lives.
Here he was, the state’s chief inquisitor about to quiz servants of the state, in the capital of their country’s greatest ally.
And so it goes, he told himself. The shit could spin out everywhere from the fan but he would still be standing afterwards, untouched and smelling of the proverbial roses. He thought, ‘I’m such a player,’ which made him smile. He wasn’t really.
His foot still throbbed, so before calling the Embassy for a car, he walked uncomfortably to a CVS pharmacy and bought some Tubi-grip bandage and painkillers and tried not to limp, all the way there and back. Calling the hospital, he was told Freund had been moved to his own room and wasn’t seeing visitors. Yossi was waiting for him at the hotel.
‘How was The Cure Bar?’ he asked.
Dov said only, ‘Good choice.’
They drove round DuPont Circle out onto Connecticut Avenue. On the William Taft Bridge, Dov admired the lion sculptures guarding it and the iron eagles atop the street lamps ready to light it. Heading for Cleveland Park, he watched the reds and golds of the fall trees that adorned Rock Creek gorge. According to Yossi, the Park had the coolest jogging paths. Do you wear the same Nikes for that, Dov mused.
Before leaving the hotel he’d Skyped Lana, hoping to speak with Yakub.
After telling his father what he’d done at school, Yakub asked excitedly, ‘Aba what will you bring me from America?’
‘What would you like? It’s a big place and the choice is huge.’ He loved his son’s long face, his dark eyes flashing with perception beneath unruly curls. He saw a little of himself, a lot of Lana, and some of Yakub’s respective grandfathers Dan and Ibrahim. The al-Batuf poise was obvious.
‘A book,’ said Yakub, head to one side, ‘With pictures all about where you’ve been.’
Dov smiled. It was an intelligent request.
‘OK, I can do that. I have to go to work in a minute Yakub so…’ It was just past four in the pm in Israel.
‘Work? Now? It’s afternoon. Mummy’s just back from her office.’
‘It’s the time difference between where you are and I am.’
‘Is it a big difference?’
‘Yes it is and it’s backwards. It’s six in the morning here. I said this is a big place.’
‘OK, Mummy says Shalom and so do I. See you soon Aba.’
‘Yes you will Yakub.’
Big. Yakub was right; the differences between the USA and Israel could be reduced to two words, big and small. Israel seemed so cramped as compared with all he saw of America. Once, he could drive out of Tel Aviv and onto the coastal road to Haifa, the scenery dotted with small towns between areas of dunes, orange groves and carp ponds. Today the towns had transformed into small cities and new-build neighborhoods with huge malls: urban sprawl was an understatement. The USA was strong, and its multi-ethnicity, its diversity, contributed to its strength. Dov wondered when his people would ever see strength in their diversity and tolerate the minorities who lived with them.
From the window, along a road the width of Israel’s intercity toll route 6, he glimpsed bars, delis, grills and barbecues, Sushi bars, the Zoo, universities, Metro stations. He saw mothers wheeling their babies in strollers, men in smart suits sitting in coffee shops talking. He was a bit of a news junky and not just for Israeli news. He loved watching American news shows and was always obsessed by those live backdrops of streets in New York or Washington or any other place where he saw traffic, and people going through their daily lives. He’d always wanted to be there and now he wa
s. If he’d had the time he would have stopped the Embassy car and gone out to talk with those he saw now. What did you think of Israel? Was it that brave little outpost of democracy far away in a Mediterranean corner, folks just like you who daily face evil Muslim terrorists like those who attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11? Do you know or care about my probe into sexual misdemeanors in the Embassy? They’d likely shrug their shoulders and say that’s life, wouldn’t they? He went back to contemplating the coming meetings, his foot hurting less.
Taking a left, Yossi announced, ‘Welcome to Embassy-ville. That’s the Chinese Embassy, they’ve got the whole of this block and it ends right opposite us.’
‘Why ville?’
‘It’s the drivers’ name. Locally it’s Embassy Row, but the drivers say it’s an Embassy town here, twelve embassies either side of this street. The Ghanaians are next door and the Jordanians are just around the corner.’ He took another left and then pulled up at a gateway to the Israel Embassy complex on the side of a slight incline on International Drive. A long wrought iron gate decorated with the state’s official seven branched Menorah symbol, wheeled open and Yossi drove in. Dov glimpsed the modern beige brick structure with recessed arched windows on upper floors, before being ushered inside.
He was shown to a small conference room. He helped himself to coffee on a sideboard. It was damn fine coffee. He sat down, put his iPad on the table then called Aviel to tell him about the attack on Daniel Freund, who promised to look into it.
Hannah Drori was beautiful with short auburn hair, tall and lithe like a gazelle, but looked like she knew she was in someone’s sights. She tried not to engage when Dov introduced himself, sitting on the edge of the seat, hands in her lap, downcast, waiting.
‘OK Hannah, is it OK if I call you…’
Her pale blue eyes came up quickly, unflinching. ‘He didn’t do it.’
‘What made you change your mind?’