by Yishai Sarid
Up in the square, the fountain was revolving and the music player wasn’t working. We went down the other side. A damp orange light poured over the city through the spaces between the buildings. A group of girls in shorts came toward us, giggling, and Hani smiled at them. The guard in the door of the center checked us casually, he didn’t check the wheelchair at all, you could bring twenty pounds of explosives in it loaded with nails and whatever you want.
I parked the chair before the movie posters. I hadn’t been to the movies in years, maybe since the child was born. Hani hadn’t seen anything either since the golden years of the American cinema in the seventies, so the two of us wanted to choose carefully. We argued a little: he wanted to go to a romantic French film and I explained to him that he was making a bad mistake, they always fail with their films. In the end, the two of us decided on a film that won the last Oscar.
I bought a big box of popcorn and two Cokes. We ate from the same box. I moved him slowly from the wheelchair to a seat on the aisle. The air conditioning was excellent. When the light went out, I gave a sigh of relief—what a joy, now I could shut up and cut myself off from the world—and I saw that he was also smiling with joy like a child. Five in the evening, the whole world is running around, going nuts, and we, at long last, are sitting in the movies.
We weren’t disappointed. The movie really was good. The two of us fell in love with the star, Jennifer Connolly; the story was convincing, we sank into it for two hours and were sorry when it ended. “No more movie?” laughed Hani when the titles came up at the end. On the way out, I saw him looking longingly at MacDonald’s; I understood that he must never have eaten their crap. I ordered him a Big Mac; he left almost the whole thing on the plate, but said politely that he liked it a lot. We talked about the film. Hani said the one thing he regretted in his life was that he wasn’t born in Hollywood and hadn’t made films like those.
“Nobody’s born in Hollywood,” I said. “You get there.”
“But nobody from Gaza gets there,” he laughed.
Hani said he’d try to walk, the film made him feel better, but after a few steps, he collapsed into my arms. I wheeled him back along Dizengoff. We passed the place where the Number 5 bus blew up across from the shwarma stand—I got there back then along with the body collectors—I almost blurted out something because we were so close, but I kept quiet. The street was full of sooty traffic, an Eastern trance accompanied us for a moment from a passing sports car. Sadness and self-pity grabbed me, and almost made me cry. A bad smell rose from him, apparently his bag had filled up.
He asked if I had a wife. I told him I had a wife and child, and she had gone to work in Boston. He said in that case both of us were alone. Only I’m still alive, habibi, and walking on my own two feet, and you’re very close to going down, I said to myself.
Now I was getting hungry and I suggested we sit down in a café and have something to eat. Why not, he said politely, I’d be very happy to do that. We sat down in an Italian-style café on the corner of Gordon Street. I maneuvered his chair to the bathroom and through the door and made sure he’d manage with all his arrangements.
“Everything’s shit,” he laughed when he came out of there and sat down in the chair. Suddenly he had the face of a bastard Arab, like the ones I could shake down for some small secrets about friends and relatives.
The waitress had beautiful skin and her face was beaming. The two of us noticed and looked at her the same way, with an admiration that will go down into the grave with us. I ordered a Milano style sausage sandwich, and to my surprise, Hani asked for pasta. As if he had decided to reward himself on our outing for all the years of hunger in Gaza. I finished my beer before the food came and ordered another one.
Hani told about the friends he had in Tel Aviv, mentioned names of cafés that had closed and books that were forgotten and people who had faded to nothing or had died; he talked about Daphna, who, whenever and wherever she appeared, was like a princess. “We’re weak and ugly humans,” he said. “But she’s like the ocean, a force of nature, she’s a diamond.”
I took a picture of the child out of my wallet, not a recent picture, and put it on the table next to him. Hani looked at it up close and said he looked like me, but you can see he has a beautiful mother. He dropped food on the picture and the sauce stained it. He was very apologetic and tried weakly to wipe it off with the napkin. The child was entirely covered with oily sauce. I took the picture and buried it back in my wallet.
Hani looked very tired. I asked if he wanted to go home. His plate was still full. “You must miss your child,” said Hani. I had to bend over to him to hear. “I remember my child when he was like that. The whole world I would have given for him. Afterward, you can’t protect him. The world is stronger than you are, the world is bad . . . ” Now he had tears in his eyes.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen your kid?” I asked. My muscles were tense, I hated the feeling of pressure before the crushing question, like a gorilla before the battle of his life. I wanted to go on talking with him man to man, without striving for any purpose.
“Almost six years,” Hani replied. “Ever since he got out of jail.” He told me the son had been imprisoned in a prison camp in the desert for two years, and after he got out, he left the country, couldn’t find anything to do with himself in Gaza.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
In a person’s look there is a blend of all kinds of things, and in Hani’s look there was now also a percentage of suspicion. But only a little. I got beyond that barrier safely.
“Wandering around,” said Hani, and sharply pushed away the plate of food. “God knows where he is now.”
I knew exactly where he was. Haim had briefed me that very morning. The man had returned from Iran to Syria.
“And your daughter?” I asked, to allay suspicion.
“The daughter is in her house. She’s got a good husband and good children.”
“Because I thought . . . ,” I began. “Listen, I’ve got quite a lot of money. I did very well in business in recent years. I can help you get together with your children. If they can’t come here, maybe we’ll arrange something outside. We can travel to a nearby place, Cyprus for instance. It shouldn’t cost too much. You’ll see the children for the last time. Think about that, Hani. I’d be glad to help.”
Hani’s response was strange. He started crying, simply bitter weeping. I had to get up to calm him down, stroke his gray hair. The beaming waitress came and asked if she could do something to help, maybe we wanted coffee and dessert.
Hani calmed down. There was silence between us. I was afraid I had exposed myself, that I was too coarse. An enormous moon rose in the distance, above the Azrieli Towers. Only when we got to her house, which was dark and stood like a ghost building among the renovated houses, did he say beneath me, from the squeaking wheelchair: “I want to go. I want to see the children. I hope you can arrange that.”
Don’t believe! I shouted inside myself. Refuse! But at the same time, the enormous joy of the hunter closing in on his prey exploded within me.
When I got upstairs with him, I was out of breath. Daphna was on the phone, feverish, gnawing her fingernails. She managed to tell me that Yotam had disappeared from the house two days ago and she had no idea where he was.
“Call me,” I signaled to her after I had dragged Hani to his sofa, where he lay helplessly. On the round table in the kitchen was a big stack of pages, written in an intelligent hand; I picked up a few bright sentences, she was progressing nicely with her book. For a moment, Daphna came very close to me. Her eyes were somewhere else. My hands almost moved to embrace her waist. She moved away quickly and continued talking on the phone. What do you think you’re doing! Don’t you dare!
I stopped at the big supermarket on the way to Ra’anana, stood in the express line with my bedtime supplies: a bottle of Arak and a chocolate bar, almonds and red grapes.
Hani’s son had been moving around
the world for a few years now unknown to us. We hadn’t noticed him until people started talking about him with respect. They relied on him. They gave him big sums of money. He came to Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut. Moved to Damascus. Then he was sent to Iran to organize courses, arrange shipments of weapons, meet with senior operatives in the revolutionary guard. He was thirty-two years old, a serious man, a methodical worker.
He moved around freely. I was stuck between Ra’anana and Ashkelon and he was traveling in Sudan, Yemen, Djibouti, to all corners of the aristocratic Arab world, to all the places our clients went to get instructions, raise money, train. Even though he was cautious, things started coming together. He worked on several projects simultaneously, some of them routine, that concluded with a suicide bomber wraking havoc on Jewish flesh, and also on some big project whose details we couldn’t figure out, causing us special concern. He put together the equipment, gathered the technicians, carefully chose the operatives; all our special means were useless. We still didn’t know what it was.
The operation wasn’t ours; the chance to help fell in our lap. Our job was to get him out of the dark holes to an exposed place where others could operate. He won’t swallow that, he’s too cautious, said Haim, he’d be very skeptical from the start. He’ll never go to a non-Arab country. They’ve learned the lessons of previous liquidations.
I went with Haim to our neighbors on the hill to report on what was happening. There was always an aroma of the duty free shop about them, European clothes, an atmosphere of high tech. Haim and I came to them like a couple of venetian blind installers, one religious, plump, and limping, the other gray and taciturn. Ever since the project had begun, we had met with them for a weekly briefing. The previous meetings were drowsy, skeptical; this time there was some tension, the smell of prey was in the air.
The partners reported that his project was progressing: new equipment had arrived, the guy was visiting the training camps, they had all kinds of setbacks but they would apparently overcome them. The problem was we didn’t know what they were planning.
“What will it achieve if we bring him down?” asked Haim, who loved to engage them in Talmudic dispute. “Their operation will go on even without him.”
“He’s the head,” explained their representative, a fresh, ruddy guy who wore a light open-necked silk shirt. “He’s the only one who knows all the details, everything is arranged in his head, all the connections are in his hands, without him, it won’t work.”
“Why not bomb the development site and destroy the operation?” asked Haim.
“Because we don’t know where the operation is based,” chuckled the partner. “We’ve only got hints, talk, movements. Nothing on the ground. We don’t have an idea where it will go. There are too many possibilities. Could be anywhere in the world, from Thailand to America.”
“So why will he come out of his hole now?” I asked. I didn’t talk much during the meetings and my voice came out hoarse, precisely because I wanted to make an impression so they’d take me seriously.
“Because he loves his father an awful lot,” smiled the redhead, who was tanned and fragrant as a yachtsman. “They’ve got great conversations between father and son on file, I wish my father and I had such relations. He misses him. He wants to say goodbye to him before he dies.”
I was angry that they had milked Daphna’s phone like a fat udder and didn’t let me read the material. They shouldn’t forget that it was I who brought him there. I’m the brains behind the whole thing.
“They mentioned you, by the way,” said the man. “The father said he knew a great guy, that if all the Jews were like him, the whole thing would be different. That you’re a good Jew.”
The table moved with a wave of laughter. I felt as if they had stood me on it naked with a dunce cap.
“What else do they talk about?” I asked quietly.
“Personal things,” said the yachtsman tranquilly and leaned back. “About the father’s health, the sister in Kuwait and her terrific children. The father brings up memories of Gaza, the seashore, how the two of them went fishing together. Yesterday, the son said he bought a rug in the market in Tehran and sent it to his sister. A few days ago, he described to his father the pyramids he saw in the desert of Sudan, he spoke about the ancient black kings who built them. It really made me want to go on a tour there in a jeep. Ask people who met him, they describe an intelligent, charismatic fellow, sharp as a razor. A monster has grown right before our eyes.”
What else did Hani say about me? I thought. What did he say about Daphna? But around the table they moved to talk about flight instruments and means of dispatching, tiny submarines sold on the black market, all the nightmares that disturb their sleep.
“How much time do we still have?” asked Haim. Their meeting room was splendid, a big window open to the sea, insulated by three layers so no sound wave would leak out. I poured a bottle of bitter lemon into a glass of ice.
“No more than ten days,” said the senior member, with cropped, graying hair, who, from the beginning of the meeting, had been looking at me skeptically and I didn’t like it. “Just get him out for us to a place where we can work on him. You need anything? You lack anything?” he asked me patronizingly, the way I talk to the lowliest of my subordinates, those who keep me informed about what’s on the menu in the Kasbah.
“We’ve got everything,” Haim answered for me. “Just leave us alone for a few more days and we’ll bring you the package.”
“Just a few days,” said their head and lit a cigarette. That amazed me—it had been a long time since I’d seen anybody smoke in a meeting, especially among those sterile characters. “We don’t want the sky to fall on our head.”
“Something about this story stinks, there are too many holes in the intelligence,” said Haim on the way back.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Got to go on, no choice,” said Haim. “We’re only bit players, but right now the whole stage is yours. Everybody’s looking at you. Everything depends on you. Everyday I report upstairs on what’s happening. You’ve advanced very well with him. Just be careful now.”
Haim got out of the car with great difficulty, hit the edge of the sidewalk and fell down, his kippa flew off his head. I quickly got out of the car to help him up. “I’m fine,” he muttered when I grabbed him under the arms, as you hold a baby. “I’m not hurt, just my head is uneasy. Promise me that everything’s fine. I don’t want us to fail with this.”
I called Daphna to invite myself for a lesson. I tried to sound relaxed so she wouldn’t know how much I depended on her. “Hani’s sleeping,” she whispered. “We went to the doctor who raised his dosage across the board, otherwise he’d be going mad with pain. They don’t give him more than a few weeks. The doctor said that was absolutely positively the end.”
I went to town while waiting for Hani to wake up. I sat in a café, I looked at the girls, I bought a collection of Frank Sinatra records on sale, I walked from one end of Dizengoff Street to the other, past all the bridal shops. Evening had fallen and Daphna hadn’t called, nor had she answered her cell phone. Just don’t let him die on me, that nice Arab. But mainly I thought about her and what she was doing when she disappeared. I parked below the American embassy, at the sea. It was dark now. I sat in the car and my eyes closed to the sound of “Strangers in the Night.”
In the middle of the night, the cell phone rang. The parking lot around me was empty, the windshield was foggy with night moisture. I raised the seat fast, shut up Frankie who was singing in an unending loop. “Come to Ikhilov,” Daphna shouted. “They’re slaughtering him, those whores.”
I didn’t know which of the two of them she was talking about, I didn’t have time to ask, I raced with the blue siren into the damp screen of the night and went into the ambulance bay displaying the document that opens every door. I saw Daphna at the end of the emergency room, getting explanations from a young doctor in turquoise scrubs.
&nb
sp; I went behind the curtain, recognized Yotam’s thin white back as he lay naked on his belly.
The art of carving on the ass was very familiar to me from my work. Collaborators had their penis cut off and stuffed in their mouth, and on the other side, on the ass, they’d carve all kinds of drawings, depending on how talented the murderer was. After we caught them, they’d give all kinds of interesting explanations, sometimes about the myths of Islam and sometimes about a basketball team.
They had given Yotam only an X on his behind, not too deep, but big. It took thirty colorful stitches to close him up. Daphna stood at his bed, her eyes swollen, trying to touch him, but he roared at her like an evil beast. From behind, you saw only long hair, an exposed back, a bandage. I went to the head of the bed to see his eyes. When he saw me, an awful smile of scorn and pain appeared on his face.
“What, my darling?” Daphna asked him, trying to stroke his head, offering him a glass of water. He answered her with a stifled roar. All around was the turmoil of a night in the emergency room, gurneys being moved back and forth, an incessant sound of distress hovered in the air. The doctor on duty left us and said somebody would soon come to take Yotam up to the ward.
The wounded boy mumbled something. Daphna wanted to hear, she was so eager to get to him she almost fell. I heard him clearly from where I was standing. “Now the picture’s perfect,” he muttered with an effort. “Mother, man, and Yotam with an X on his ass. Your holy trinity is realized, Mother.”
“Why do you talk to me like that?’ she flinched, but came back to him immediately, touched his dirty hair. “It will pass,” she told him. “They said they’d graft some skin and nothing will be seen.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they can leave it,” he squeaked. “I’ll show my ass to people on Dizengoff and collect charity.” He groaned with pain and Daphna went to look for the doctor to ask them to give him something for the pain.