by Paul Usiskin
He tried mind control and settled on Yakub. He had rationalized, almost, what Lana had told him about someone else in her life. Whatever the implications, the one person he could not lose was Yakub. He kept him sane, human.
So when Lana called him that evening on his way back to Tel Aviv he loved the coincidence.
‘Dov, I need a favor.’
‘Sure, anything.’
‘My babysitter’s just called in sick and I can’t find anyone else. Can you look after Yakub?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time can you get here? I’ve made food for the babysitter, just needs warming up and Yakub’s had his.’
Dov went quiet before answering. He glanced at the dash clock.
‘I’ll be about twenty minutes? It would be great if Yakub could spend the night at mine.’
Lana said nothing for long enough that Dov asked, ‘Is that OK?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘What were your plans for tonight?’
More silence in which Dov worked it out for himself. She was going to ‘see’ her new man.
‘OK, I suppose this was inevitable,’ she said and he could see her lips narrowing for the long lapse in the call.
He made it to a count of ten. ‘Yes, I suppose it was.’ He hung up and accelerated, exultant at the prospect of having Yakub come to stay at last. There was the model remote control plane he’d impulse purchased weeks before and kept forgetting to give him. It wasn’t only sharing his home space with Yakub, it was the sound of his son’s brilliant laughter he anticipated with a broad smile of pleasure.
Lana sat holding her phone in her hand. Was this normal? I’m negotiating with my ex-lover to have him look after our son, so that I can be with my new lover. Is that normal? Is anything in my life normal? What do other people do? Maybe they just get on with their lives passively, no doubts, no questions about right or fair or proper. She acknowledged that she owed Dov much. He’d shown her what making love was, how the touch and feel of another being could generate such passion, with all its physical satisfaction, and she needed that, as she needed a man in her life. The give and take over Yakub, that he was about to spend time with Dov, could hardly be a high price for that. It must be normal for a Palestinian woman to fall in love with a Palestinian man, just as once this Palestinian woman had been in love with an Israeli. It had been normal for her and Dov as human beings, despite what their communities would think. She packed a bag for Yakub telling him where he was going. He couldn’t hold back his excitement.
Around half past midnight two people gazed at the same sea.
Yakub had been quietly nagging about spending the night with Adwan at Dalia and Abed’s house two streets away. Lana had agreed.
Dalia epitomized everything Lana admired. She was a superb lecturer at both a Muslim college and a prestigious Israeli university. But there was more. She had new ideas for teaching Muslim children. She’d devised a new system based on teaching English in a format that was easily accessible. She’d started a private after-school pilot with thirty children; the children who studied with her did much better in their state day-schools, and were consistently at the top of their classes.
Lana was very canny. She thought that Yakub’s friendship with Adwan would help when she was ready to talk to Dalia about getting Yakub into her private school. And once Dalia agreed she’d ask Dov to help her with the fees.
These were her thoughts as she stood watching the sea from her window, wrapped in a towel, her lover, asleep on the bed behind her. He was her mystery man and she was in love with him. They’d met one day, three months before as she and Yakub were leaving the mosque. They’d chatted and he’d asked if she’d like to have coffee with him. At first she’d declined. He phoned her a week later with tickets for a local theatre production. She accepted without asking how he got her number.
They’d made love the first time, that night in a little flat he said, ‘I sometimes use when I’m in Yaffa.’ He never told her what he did for a day job, and she never asked. It was obvious that he was a somebody, but the affair they began brought Lana what she wanted, needed since Dov. Dov had been exotic because he represented the other. This new man could have been a Palestinian Dov. His name was Khalil. He traveled extensively and from the way he talked, he was involved in Palestinian affairs, an employee of the state in waiting. Whatever he did, he knew a lot about her. Rather than be offended at how much he knew, she was flattered.
Dov sat at the seaward balcony, thoughts ranging from Yakub and Lana to the investigation and all the as yet unconnected elements, avoiding the empty space in his heart until it became too hard to avoid and he couldn’t keep loneliness at bay. Whatever would be the future, Yakub had a place in it, and so did Lana. It was hard to reconcile, but Lana’s declaration of her red lines forced him to admit that she would never be his again. That dream had ended, he had to lock it up and throw away the key and add another layer of experiences, of love with someone else to seal up the want he had for her.
He knew himself well. Too often in past relationships that were initially physical, he’d wanted, hoped, that they’d translate into something longer lasting, but they never did and he’d accepted his naivety. But all his self-knowledge wouldn’t stop him repeating his naive mistakes.
15
Ghazi Shehadeh went to meet Sherbaniya in a noisy café at the Plaza shopping centre in Al-Bireh. Sherbaniyah was a man in his fifties, long settled into his skin, physically heavier than necessary. He wore a gray suit, and a black turtle neck. He had short-cropped silver hair and pewter eyes, close set in a long face, his cheeks shiny from years of shaving. His umbrella stood by the wall, pooling water on the tiles from the downpour outside. The service was slow and the coffee awful, from a machine that sounded like a jet plane ascending. What could you expect from this garish place?
He watched Ghazi park his car outside and run through the rain carried by gusting wind, soaking his trouser legs.
Sherbaniyah had been a teacher, inspiring students and fellow teachers alike, in an East Jerusalem school. As the occupation deepened and the security barrier snaked its way further through the West Bank, he’d shifted from non-engagement, harboring still the wish for the peace process to succeed, into hard line dissidence, sure no process would work. The barrier symbolized more than Israeli desires to wall off the Palestinians. They were walling themselves in, a protracted and costly act of self-isolation. At the same time the Palestinian Authority had become, exactly as he’d feared, a bloated pawn and a punch bag for the Israelis.
Ghazi had reached out to him. Sherbaniyah had agreed to meet partly out of sympathy for a fellow Muslim in distress and partly out of opportunism. His cynicism had become second nature but he had a family of his own and couldn’t imagine how devastating losing four members of it would be and being unable to mourn for them.
Amer Shehadeh, Ghazi’s father, enjoyed his money and his influence; the need to fight the Israelis and their occupation was secondary or so Sherbaniyah believed. Amer had been a Fateh man from the start, handy when he stood as Al-Bireh’s mayor. His sons had benefited from their father’s connections; Ghazi became a successful solar energy entrepreneur and entered politics, on Amer’s coat tails, accumulating influence.
Sherbaniyah became Hamas’s man in Ramallah. He was wanted by both Fateh and the Israelis. He was risking much by meeting in so public a location; it was his way of signaling respect for the Shehadeh family’s bereavement. The choice of this cafe was a variation of hiding in plain sight; a team of armed men was positioned as covertly as possible to secure him.
‘Ya Sherbaniyah, thanks for meeting me,’ Ghazi said.
‘To Allah we belong and to Him we all return,’ he said offering his condolences.
Ghazi said that he and his family needed closure.
‘Indeed. Whatever Allah gives or takes belongs to Him and everything is pre
destined by Him,’ Ghazi said mournfully. ‘If only we knew where they were taken. Then we could retrieve their remains and bury them and mourn properly. But I have no idea where to look.’
‘I’ll ask our brothers. It’s the least I can do.’
Once he’d called Ziad’s contact, Hisham planned his visit to the cemetery. He wanted to be surreptitious. Turning up at a northern West Bank checkpoint asking to go to the Galilee wouldn’t do that, though that was the ideal shortest distance. There were ways of avoiding the checkpoints, but there was always a chance of being caught. Hisham contacted friends in East Jerusalem.
All he’d had to endure was the early morning queue at the Qalandiya checkpoint. His PCP ID helped a little; he wasn’t quizzed or searched. His ID was checked and he was waved through. He was met by Samir a driver in a white VW cab. It smelled of new car and Samir kept on about how its diesel engine purred instead of clattering like the old ones. It had an Israeli plate and the word CAB in black Hebrew letters on both front doors and the company phone number on the rear doors.
Even though this was a circuitous way to reach the cemetery, the rest of the journey took about ninety minutes, thanks to Route 6, the north-south toll road. The radio was full of news of the cease-fire, agreed the day before in Cairo, ending the second Gaza war. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had been personally involved, suggesting to Hisham that the new Morsi government in Egypt wanted a diplomatic success under its belt and accepted US involvement to achieve it. That left a bitter taste in Hisham’s mouth; he was no Muslim Brotherhood fan, but Western involvement in the Middle East always disquieted him.
Hisham was meeting a man in Wadi Hamam, a Bedouin village near Tiberias. He only had a cell number. The village had a beautiful minaret and a small golden dome over the main prayer hall of its mosque. Mount Nitai, a flat-topped hill, dominated the village. Daoud al Akras guided them to his house by cell, welcomed them, gave them coffee. Before he described what he knew, Samir got up, thanked him for his hospitality and went to sit in his cab.
Daoud was in his forties, wearing a yellow polo shirt, jeans and NIKEs, not the classical Bedouin nomad in flowing robe, keffiyah, sandals. He was square faced, a weathered complexion, deep worry lines around his eyes. He spoke with head down, eyes flicking nervously to Hisham, his hands waving, acutely uncomfortable.
‘The Jews love to dig,’ he began with a thin smile, ‘like the Roman village they’ve discovered at the foot of our mountain, or the roads they make across our lands. Over the years they were digging in our cemetery.’
Hisham asked the obvious. ‘In the cemetery? What did they want there?’
‘To bury bodies. I was young at the time. I saw them. They opened the cemetery gates, entered, and dug a long wide trench near a carob tree. They gave me cigarettes and money and I helped bring them breeze-blocks from a builder’s to outline the trench. When they finished they fixed numbers on metal plates like vehicle plates on stakes in the ground next to the trench. I didn’t understand. I was very innocent. When I told my father he beat me and told me never to speak of it.’
‘Did you ever find out why they were digging there?’
‘Only when I was older. There were rumors of ‘cemeteries of numbers’, ours wasn’t the only one. They bury our martyrs, numbering each one and keeping the lists for negotiations for the return of Jewish dead. Then they dig up the bodies and exchange them.’
Hisham felt a mix of revulsion and frustration, at the disrespect the Israelis had shown for the cemetery and at the villagers’ passivity.
‘Take me there.’
Daoud looked nervous. ‘No one goes near that part of the cemetery.’
Hisham shook his head but said nothing.
‘It’s easy for you to come and tell me to go to the cemetery, then you go away again. I have to be very careful. If I’m seen, other villagers will make life difficult for me. You must know what village life is like, clans disagreeing, families rowing, rumors spreading wildly. Who knows? Someone may tell the army about me and then I’d have to take my family and leave.’
‘Well it depends what we find there. If there’s been new activity I’d want to investigate it.’
‘You mean dig it up?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s forbidden.’
‘You heard about the Shehadeh family? If their remains are in that cemetery, that’s forbidden too. You can’t tell me you won’t help the family. They are in pieces with grief.’
‘I’ll be risking a lot. That has to be taken into account.’
‘How much taken into account are you talking about?’
‘Fifty thousand.’
‘I see. That’s too much. I’d have to discuss it with my superiors.’
‘Dollars.’
‘Forget it,’ Hisham stood up and made for the door, opened it and called out to Samir, ‘We’re going back.’
‘Forty thousand,’ Daoud said.
Hisham shouted to Samir, ‘I’m just saying goodbye to Daoud.’
‘Thirty.’
‘Fifteen, in Israeli Shekalim, and I’ll still have to get it approved and I’d need to visit the cemetery now.’
‘Twenty. We’ll have to wait until dark.’
Hisham called his Chief. He had to hold the phone away from his ear; the ex-paratrooper had a comprehensive list of swear words.
‘I’m going to take a look.’ The Chief grunted and ended the call.
Daoud’s cell rang and Hisham heard him speaking quietly.
It was dusk as they approached the green cemetery gates; Hisham thought perhaps cemeteries should be places of celebration. He’d seen a TV documentary about the Mexican Dia de Las Muertos, Day of the Dead, an annual holiday when families came to honor their departed, cleaning the grave and bringing offerings of marigolds and bottles of mezcal or tequila, and even picnics. It was an appealing contrast to the crowded silence of the cemetery at his home in Nablus. Another thought came to him. Cemeteries were not just burial places, they were proof of continued existence. The older a cemetery was and properly maintained, the longer it attested to the history of the place it served. It was one more essential symbol of continuity, especially to those who felt the threat of dispossession. This cemetery was well tended, shaded by eucalyptus and carob trees, simple headstones with triangular tops, many of them marking unadorned sarcophagi, lightly graveled pathways in between.
Thick rain clouds blackened the sky, accentuating the advancing night, promising fresh torrents. Daoud led Hisham to a spindly carob tree standing sentinel on a low hill. The earth smell mixed with recently showered vegetation, creating a soft spiciness in the air. Closer to the carob he saw that it had been carefully pruned. Below it, breeze-blocks marked a long rectangle with the metal numbered plates planted into the ground at regular intervals, just as Daoud had described.
The rectangle’s presence jarred with the rest of the cemetery.
‘What can we do?’ asked Daoud. ‘We believe the dead are Muslims, so we can’t just dig them up. We don’t know who they are or where they’re from. Only once, the army agreed to return a body from such a place, but it was after a lengthy and costly appeal to the Supreme Court and even then, the army ignored the court order and just came to the martyr’s family home one day with the body. It was sixteen years after he’d died, killed in an army raid.’
Hisham listened, down on hands and knees examining the earth inside the breeze-block line. Daoud begged him to get up. Even with the recent rainfall Hisham could tell that a section of topsoil had been recently disturbed. There was no metal plate. He stood, brushing clinging wet soil from his trousers, wiping his fingers on a pocket tissue.
‘When can we come back?’
‘It’ll be dark in about half an hour,’ said Daoud. ‘And there’ll be another downpour.’
He was right. As night fell, so did the rain, lasting nearly t
wenty minutes, it drummed and hissed all around the village. Waiting for it to cease, he called his Chief who said he’d spoken with Amer Shehadeh. He was willing to pay what Daoud al Akras wanted, but Hisham was to say only half the money could be found. ‘You can lie to a liar,’ the Chief said, ‘because lies are his currency.’ As Hisham hung up, Daoud’s cell rang again.
Minutes after the rain ended, Daoud said they should return to the cemetery. Hisham noted the should. On the way he told him about the money. Daoud made no comment.
The green gates were momentarily illuminated by headlights. They came from a large vehicle. It was difficult to tell its color in the deep dark. Five men exited, two well dressed in smart rain jackets. The third was nondescript in an old frayed top coat and a wool hat pulled over his ears who gave Hisham a scornful stare. He was followed by the driver and a solid looking man in work clothes. They all stood by the gates as the tallest introduced himself to Daoud as Ghazi Shehadeh, the second, Aisha’s brother Walid, and the man in the wool hat as a friend. He was Sherbaniyah’s deputy. Ghazi handed Daoud a thick roll of money.
Daoud counted the notes. Hisham saw they were dollar bills.
Ghazi said, ‘My family agreed to what you asked, but only after they have buried their loved ones, will you have the rest.’
Hisham bit his tongue at Daoud’s double dealing. His calls must have been with Ghazi, cutting out the PCP. Speaking with Ghazi Shehadeh, Hisham was careful and respectful. All Shehadeh said was, ‘the friends have been very helpful,’ then turned to watch as Daoud opened the gates, and the driver drove the SUV quickly inside. It was a late model Mercedes, raindrops twinkling on the waxed bodywork. The driver parked under a wooden shelter with a corrugated iron roof. He opened the tailgate, the worker removed a shovel and a pick, and the driver took out three flashlights. Daoud led them to the cemetery of numbers.