by Philip Roth
5
I Am
Pipik
The Ramallah military court lay within the walls of a jail built by the British during the Mandate, a low, concrete, bunkerlike complex whose purpose it would have been hard to misconstrue—it was a punishment just to look at it. The jail was perched atop a bald, sandy hill at the edge of the city, and we turned at the roundabout at the foot of the hill and drove up to the high chain fence, topped by a double roll of barbed wire, that enclosed the outermost perimeter of the four or five acres separating the jail from the road below. George and I got out of the car and approached the gate to present our papers to one of three armed guards. Without speaking, the guard examined them and handed them back, and we were permitted to advance another hundred feet to a second gatehouse, where a submachine gun jutting out the window was aimed at whatever ascended the drive. The gun was manned by a grim, unshaven young soldier, who eyed us soberly while we handed our papers over to another guard, who tossed them onto his desk and, with a truculent gesture, indicated that we could go on.
“Sephardic boys,” George told me as we continued toward a side door of the jail. “Moroccans. The Ashkenazis prefer to keep their hands clean. They get their darker brethren to do their torturing for them. The ignorant Arab haters from the Orient furnish the refined Ashkenazis with a very useful, all-purpose proletarian mob. Of course when they lived in Morocco they didn’t hate Arabs. They lived harmoniously with Arabs for a thousand years. But the white Israelis have taught them that, too—how to hate the Arabs and how to hate themselves. The white Israelis have turned them into their thugs.”
The side door was guarded by a pair of soldiers who, like those we’d just encountered, looked to have been recruited from the meanest city streets. They let us through without a word, and we stepped into a shabby courtroom barely large enough for a couple of dozen spectators. Occupying half the seats were more Israeli soldiers, who weren’t carrying weapons that I could see but who didn’t appear as though they’d have much trouble putting down a disturbance with just their bare hands. In scruffy fatigues and combat boots, their shirt collars open and their heads bare, they sat lazily sprawled about but nonetheless looking very proprietary with their arms spread to either side along the back rail of the wooden benches. My first impression was of young toughs lolling in the outer lobby of an employment agency that specialized in placing bouncers.
On the raised dais at the front of the courtroom, between two large Israeli flags pinned to the wall behind him, sat the judge, a uniformed army officer in his thirties. Slender, slightly balding, clean-shaven, carefully turned out, he listened to the proceedings with the perspicacious air of a mild, judicious person—one of “us.”
In the second row down from the dais, a seated spectator gestured toward George, and we two slipped quietly in beside him. No soldiers sat in this row. They had grouped themselves together further back, near a door at the rear of the room, which I saw opened onto the detention area for the defendants. Before the door was pulled shut, I glimpsed an Arab boy. You could read the terror on his face even from thirty feet away.
We had joined the poet-lawyer whose brother was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails and whom George had described as a formidable opponent of the Israeli occupation. When George introduced us he took my hand and pressed it warmly. Kamil° was his name, a tall, mustached man, skeletally thin, with the molten, black, meaningful eyes of what they used to call a ladies’ man and a manner that reminded me of the persuasively debonair disguise that George had worn back when he was Zee in Chicago.
Kamil explained to George, in English, that his brother’s case had still not been heard. George lifted a finger toward the dock to greet the brother, a boy of about sixteen or seventeen whose vacant expression suggested to me that he was, at least for the moment, paralyzed more by boredom than by fear. Altogether there were five Arab defendants in the dock, four teenagers and a man of about twenty-five whose case had been argued since morning. Kamil explained to me in a whisper that the prosecution was trying to renew the detention order of the older defendant, an alleged thief said to have stolen two hundred dinars, but that the Arab policeman testifying for the prosecution had only just arrived in the court. I looked to where the policeman was being cross-examined by the defense lawyer, who, to my surprise, wasn’t an Arab but an Orthodox Jew, an imposingly bearded bear of a man, probably in his fifties, wearing a skullcap along with his black legal gown. The interpreter, seated at the center of the proceedings just down from the judge, was a Druze, Kamil told me, an Israeli soldier who spoke Arabic and Hebrew. The lawyer for the prosecution was, like the judge, an army officer in uniform, a delicate-looking young fellow who had the air of someone engaged in an exceedingly tiresome task, though momentarily he seemed amused, as did the judge, by a remark of the policeman’s just translated by the interpreter.
My second Jewish courtroom in two days. Jewish judges. Jewish laws. Jewish flags. And non-Jewish defendants. Courtrooms such as Jews had envisioned in their fantasies for many hundreds of years, answering longings even more unimaginable than those for an army or a state. One day we will determine justice!
Well, the day had arrived, amazingly enough, and here we were, determining it. The unidealized realization of another hope-filled human dream.
My two companions focused only briefly on the cross-examination; soon George had a pad in his hand and was making notes to himself while Kamil was once again whispering directly into my face, “My brother has been given an injection.”
I thought at first that he’d said “injunction.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“An injection.” He illustrated by pressing his thumb into my upper arm.
“For what?”
“For nothing. To weaken his constitution. Now he aches all over. Look at him. He can barely hold his head up. A sixteen-year-old,” he said, plaintively unfurling his hands before him, “and they have made him sick with an injection.” The hands indicated that this was what they did and there was no way to stop them. “They use medical personnel. Tomorrow I’ll go complain to the Israeli medical society. And they will accuse me of libel.”
“Maybe he got an injection from medical personnel,” I whispered back, “because he was already ill.”
Kamil smiled as you smile at a child who plays with its toys while, in the hospital, one of its parents is dying. Then he put his lips to my ear to hiss, “It is they who are ill. This is how they suppress the revolt of the nationalist core. Torturing in ways that don’t leave marks.” He motioned toward the policeman on the witness stand. “Another sham. The case goes on and on only to extend our agony. This is the fourth day this has happened. They think that if they frustrate us long enough we will run away to live on the moon.”
The next time Kamil turned to whisper to me, he took my hand in his as he spoke. “Everywhere I meet people from South Africa,” he whispered. “I talk to them. I ask them questions. Because this gets so much like that every day.”
Kamil’s whispering was beginning to get on my nerves, as was the role in which I’d cast myself for whatever perverse and unexplained reason. How can we serve you? Either Kamil was working to recruit me as an ally against the Jews or he was testing to see if my usefulness was anything like George had surmised it to be on the basis of my visit with Lech Walesa. I thought, I’ve been putting myself in difficulties like this all my life but, up till now, by and large in fiction. How exactly do I get out of this?
Again there was the pressure of Kamil’s shoulder against my own and his warm breath on my skin. “Is this not correct? If it weren’t that Israel was Jewish—”
There was the sharp smack of a gavel striking, the judge’s way of suggesting to Kamil that perhaps it was time to shut up. Kamil, imperturbable, sighed and, crossing his hands in his lap, bore his reprimand in a state of ruminative meditation for about two minutes. Then he was at my ear again. “If it weren’t that Israel was Jewish, would not the same American Jewis
h liberals who are so identified with its well-being, would they not condemn it as harshly as South Africa for how it treats its Arab population?”
I chose again not to reply, but this discouraged him no more than the gavel had. “Of course, South Africa is irrelevant now. Now that they are breaking hands and giving their prisoners medical injections, now one thinks not of South Africa but of Nazi Germany.”
Here I turned my face to his as instinctively as I would hit the brake if something darted out in front of my car. And gazing altogether unaggressively at me were those liquid eyes with that bottomless eloquence which was all opacity to me. I had only to nod sympathetically, to nod and arrange my face in my gravest expression, in order to carry on the masquerade—but what was the purpose of this masquerade? If it had ever had a purpose, I was too provoked by my taunter’s reckless rhetoric to remember what it was and get on with the act. I’d heard enough. “Look,” I said, starting quiet and low but, surprisingly, as the words came, all at once flaring out of control, “Nazis didn’t break hands. They engaged in industrial annihilation of human beings. They made a manufacturing process of death. Please, no metaphors where there is recorded history!”
With that I sprang to my feet, but as I pushed past George’s legs the judge swung the gavel, twice this time, and in the row at the back four soldiers promptly stood and I saw the armed guard at the door toward which I was headed move to block my way. Then the perspicacious judge, speaking in English, ringingly announced to the courtroom, “Mr. Roth is morally appalled by our neocolonialism. Make way. The man needs air.” He spoke next in Hebrew and the guard blocking the door moved aside and I pushed the door open and stepped into the yard. But I had barely a moment to begin to figure out how I was going to find my way back to Jerusalem on my own before everyone I had left behind came pouring through the door after me. Everyone but George and Kamil. Had they been arrested? When I peered back through the open door I saw that the prisoners had been removed from the dock and, except at the dais, the room was empty. And there beside the chair of the army judge, who’d apparently called a recess in order to address them privately, stood my two missing companions. The judge happened at the moment to be listening and not speaking. It was George who was speaking. Foaming. Kamil stood quietly beside him, a very tall man with his hands in his pockets, an attacker whose onslaught was tamed by a cunning camouflaged to look just like forbearance.
The defense lawyer, the large bearded man in the skullcap, industriously smoked a cigarette only a few feet away from me. He smiled when I turned his way, a smile with a needle in it. “So,” he said, as though before we had even exchanged a word we had already reached a stalemate. He lit a second cigarette with the butt of his first and, after a little frenzy of deep inhalations, spoke again. “So you’re the one they’re all talking about.”
Inasmuch as he’d seen me tête-à-tête in the courtroom with the locally renowned brother of an Arab defendant and had to have assumed from that, however incorrectly, that my bias, if I had one, couldn’t be entirely antithetical to his, I was unprepared for the flagrant disdain. Another antagonist. But mine or Pipik’s? As it turned out, a little of each.
“Yes, you open your mouth,” he said, “and whatever comes out, the whole world takes notice. The Jews begin to beat their breasts. ‘Why is he against us? Why isn’t he for us?’ That must be a wonderful feeling, its mattering so much what you are for or against.”
“A better feeling, I assure you, than being a lawyer pleading petty- theft cases out in the sticks.”
“A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Orthodox Jewish lawyer. Don’t minimize my insignificance.”
“Go away,” I said.
“You know, when the schmucks here get on me for defending Arabs, I don’t usually bother to listen. ‘It’s a living,’ I tell them. ‘What do you expect from a shyster like me?’ I tell them that the Arab respects a fat man, a fat man can screw them really good. But when George Ziad brings to this courtroom his celebrity leftists, then I seem to myself nearly as despicable as they are. At least you have the excuse of self-advancement. How will you get to Stockholm without your Third World credentials?”
“Of course. All a part of the assault on the prize.”
“The glamorous one, their courtroom bard, has he told you yet about the burning building? ‘If you jump out of a burning building, you may land on the back of a man who happens to be walking along the street. That is a bad enough accident. You then don’t have to start beating him over the head with a stick. But that is what is happening on the West Bank. First they landed on people’s backs, in order to save themselves, and now they are beating them over the head.’ So folkloric. So very authentic. Hasn’t he taken you by the hand yet? He will, very stirringly, when you are ready to go. This is when Kamil gets the Academy Award. ‘You will leave here and forget, and she will leave here and forget, and George will leave here, and for all I know perhaps even George will forget. But the one who receives the strokes, he has an experience different from that of the one who counts the strokes.’ Yes, they have a great catch in you, Mr. Roth. A Jewish Jesse Jackson—worth a thousand Chomskys. And here they are,” he said, looking to where George and Kamil had stepped through the courtroom door and into the yard, “the world’s pet victims. What is their dream? Palestine or Palestine and Israel too? Ask them sometime to try and tell you the truth.”
What George and Kamil did first when they joined us was to shake the large lawyer’s hand; in turn he offered each a cigarette, and when I refused one, he lit himself another and began to laugh, a harsh, tearing noise with cavernous undertones that did not bring good tidings from the bronchial tubes; another thousand packs and he might never again have to endure the sickly naiveté of celebrity leftists like Jesse Jackson and me. “The eminent author,” he explained to George and Kamil, “doesn’t know what to make of our cordiality.” To me he then confided, “This is the Middle East. We all know how to lie with a smile. Sincerity is not of this world, but these native boys make a specialty of underdoing it. That’s something you find out about Arabs—perfectly natural in both roles at the same time. So convincing one way—just like you when you write—and then, the next moment, someone will walk out of the room, they’ll turn around and be just the opposite.”
“And how do you account for this?” I asked him.
“One’s interest allows anything. Very, very basic. Comes from the desert. That blade of grass is mine and my animal is going to get it or die. It’s my animal or your animal. That’s where interest begins and it justifies all duplicity. There is in Islam this idea of taqiya. Generally called in English ‘dissimulation.’ It’s especially strong in Shi’ite Islam but it’s all over Islamic culture. Doctrinally speaking, dissimulation is part of Islamic culture, and the permission to dissimulate is widespread. The culture doesn’t expect that you’ll speak in a way that endangers you and certainly not that you’ll be candid and sincere. You would be considered foolish to do that. People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: ‘the shifting sands’—ramál mutaharrika. An example. For all their bravado about opposing Zionism, throughout the Mandate they sold land to the Jews. Not just their run-of-the-mill opportunists but also their big leadership. But they have a wonderful proverb to justify this as well. Ad-daroori lih achkaam. ‘Necessity has its own rules.’ Dissimulation, two-facedness, secretiveness—all highly regarded values among your friends,” he told me. “They don’t think that other people have to know what is really on their minds. Very different from Jews, you see, telling everything that’s on their minds to everyone nonstop. I used to think that God has given the Jew the Arab to bedevil his conscience and keep it Jewish. I know better since meeting George and the bard. God sent us the Arab so we could learn from him how to refine our own deviousness.”
“And why,” George asked him, “did God give the Arab the Jew?”
�
�To punish him,” the lawyer answered. “You know that better than anyone. To punish him, of course, for falling away from Allah. George is a great sinner,” he said to me. “He can tell you some entertaining stories about falling away.”
“And Shmuel° is a greater actor even than I am a sinner,” said George. “In our communities he plays the role of a saint—a Jew who defends the Arab’s civil rights. To be represented by a Jewish lawyer—this way there is at least a chance in the courtroom. Even Demjanjuk thinks this way. Demjanjuk fired his Mr. O’Brien and hired Sheftel because he too is deluded enough to think it will help. I heard the other day that Demjanjuk told Sheftel, ‘If I had a Jewish lawyer to begin with, I’d never be in this trouble now.’ Shmuel, admittedly, is no Sheftel. Sheftel is the antiestablishment superstar—he’ll squeeze those Ukrainians for all they’re worth. He’ll make half a million on this Treblinka guard. That isn’t the humble way of Saint Shmuel. Saint Shmuel doesn’t care how little he is paid by his impoverished defendants. Why should he? He receives his paycheck elsewhere. It isn’t enough that Shin Bet corrodes our life here by buying an informer in every family. It isn’t enough to play the serpent like that with people already oppressed and, you would think, humiliated quite enough already. No, even the civil-rights lawyer must be a spy, even that they must corrupt.”