What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife?

by David Harris-Gershon

  “Think about what?”

  “You don’t travel by car on Shabbat, do you?”

  “I’m going, David.”

  “I didn’t even think about it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Can you go?”

  “It’s fine. This is what I came here for. I’m going with you.”

  I pointed to the Toys “R” Us bag on the couch. “Want to see what I bought for Mohammad’s children?”

  “Toys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe let me unpack first.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why toys?”

  I shrugged. With the trip to East Jerusalem for a meeting with the Odeh family a sunrise away, I had decided that an offering would be appropriate, having no idea whether such a gesture would translate as being generous or offensive, whether the family would be pleased or taken aback by such gift-giving.

  Earlier in the day, unable to sit still while waiting for Julie to arrive, I had polled Debbie and James for help as the sun made its slow descent. I didn’t have much time.

  Me:

  I think maybe I should buy some gifts for the kids. Do they do things like that? Or expect gift-giving from guests?

  Them:

  How would I know?

  Me:

  I don’t know. It’s a nice idea, right?

  Them:

  Yeah. Sure. Buy them gifts. Can’t hurt.

  Me:

  Are you sure?

  Them:

  No.

  Me:

  Then should I not buy anything?

  Them:

  Do you want to buy something?

  Me:

  I don’t know. I mean, when someone invites you over to their home to host you, don’t you usually bring something as a common courtesy?

  Them:

  I’m not usually hosted by people who might want me dead.

  Me:

  Fuck, come on.

  Them:

  You’re nuts. Go to the store already, will you?

  A Toys “R” Us employee approached wearing a button with a smiling giraffe and asked, “Rotzeh ezrah?” – Need any help? I shook my head. If you only knew, I thought, returning to the shelves, looking for something modest, something small that had nothing to do with pink ponies, lily-white princesses, or monster trucks. What should I buy them? I stared at a wall of Western toys made with American children in mind, now being marketed and sold in Jerusalem, New York’s sixth borough, as the city is sometimes sarcastically called. I tried to focus on what the child of a traditionally Muslim, Palestinian family would appreciate.

  After thirty minutes of fondling pieces of plastic made in China, I finally came upon a section in the back reserved for simple gifts, the type of items American parents buy to stuff in birthday favor gift-bags handed out to a bunch of tots attending little Johnny’s bash at Chuck E. Cheese’s: translucent rubber balls; pencils shaped like candy canes; smiley face stickers. I needed something for an eleven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl. The store was closing. Sifting through the bins, I found a modest stencil set wrapped in plastic. No pop-culture figures pasted on the front, just five colored pencils and a pink protractor with geometric shapes cut into it for tracing. It felt right. For the girl. Then back to the bin. I tossed aside talking key chains and sheets of temporary pirate tattoos as the giraffe-emblazoned clerks made signals that they were shutting for Shabbat. On the shelf in front of me, a small Rubik’s Cube materialized. A puzzle, the red and green sides visible, colors contained in the Palestinian national flag waving before me. Of course, I thought, plucking it from the shelf. A riddle.

  When I awoke the next morning, the apartment was empty, its other inhabitants having crept out at dawn to attend Saturday morning services at various shuls in the neighborhood. Shuffling to the kitchen, groggy from a restless sleep, I made myself some instant Nescafé. Stirring the black, dry crystals into a mug of steaming water, I waited for the miracle of dissolution to occur, then took a sip, cringed, and searched for some sugar to dilute the stale, pungent grounds. Opening a drawer, a red Swiss Army knife slid to the front and glared at me. I glared back and thought, I might need you, grabbed the knife and my coffee, and walked onto the mirpeset – the balcony overlooking a small, side street. I knew it was ridiculous to take the knife. My fears were baseless, and this one-inch piece of sharpened metal would do nothing for me if I actually found myself in a dangerous situation. But this didn’t stop me from pulling it out, folding open the longest blade, and experimenting with it by stabbing the table’s wicker frame. I wanted to know if I could stab without worrying about the blade folding down on my fingers, and so I played with a few different techniques. First, holding the blade parallel to the ground, I poked the table with sharp, downward thrusts. That worked well – the blade was steady. Then, turning the sharp edge skyward with my hand gripping the handle from underneath, I stabbed the table’s frame with upward jabs. This worked as well, and after some practice rounds in which I shredded a small patch of the wicker, I decided that, yes, this would do. I would hold it from underneath. Besides, I thought, if I found myself in a pinch, opening the knife quickly would land it in this position anyway. And since I’d be holding it with my life on the line, unable to think about how best to strike, things were pretty much settled: blade up, hand beneath.

  Then, still holding the knife, enjoying the sun and the quiet of a Jerusalem Shabbat, I read an article from the Friday paper about the Israeli psychology establishment’s outdated reliance on Freud and psychotherapy.

  Before everyone returned home for Shabbat lunch (James and Debbie had prepared it the day before and placed it on a blech to warm), I rose from the mirpeset to get dressed. The question of what to wear was a difficult one. I knew to dress respectfully, but had no idea what the Odeh family’s economic standing was. Were they poor? Well-off? Was Silwan a destitute neighborhood, or economically mixed? I didn’t want to offend anyone by looking like a shlump, which was how many would characterize my day-to-day appearance. But I didn’t want to overdress either, both out of a sensitivity to my guests as well as a fear I might be mugged by Palestinian kids for my leather shoes or suit jacket, a ridiculous, offensive fear fed by stories I remembered from my childhood of inner-city teenagers being murdered in Atlanta for their Nike Air Jordans. My suitcase open on the floor, all I saw was a neurotic equation: blue tie + pink dress shirt = a blunt object to the head. I scolded myself for such thoughts – You’re an asshole – and chose black dress pants, a grey wool sweater, and a white T-shirt underneath. Respectable. Sharp. But not overdone. And sandals with black socks. Perfect.

  The plan was to meet Mariam, my translator, at the Tayelet – a scenic overlook in northern Jerusalem – approximately a ten-minute walk from James and Debbie’s apartment. By three o’clock, after the lunch crowd had slid from the dining room table to the futon and a few scattered chairs, Julie said she couldn’t stand my nervous tics any longer: the tapping feet; the constant nose-scratching (often unjustly misdiagnosed as nose-picking); the chronic time-checks. She leaned over to me on the futon and finally asked, “You want to leave now?”

  “Yeah, I think we should go.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  We waved goodbye, descended the stairs, and proceeded north, my heart in my throat.

  “Are you nervous?” Julie asked, matching my pace.

  “Nervous? I don’t even know what I am anymore.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, fingering the knife tucked away in a pocket. “But last night was a bit too much for me.”

  Julie nodded in agreement.

  The night before, after Friday evening dinner with friends, Julie and I had made our way to the home of Rabbi Landes, the Rosh Yeshiva (director) of Pardes, where Jamie and I had been studying when the bomb exploded at Hebrew University. He was the one next to whom I had nervously chuckled after botching the Psalms reading as Jamie lay sedated in
the operating room and our friends lay dead. Rabbi Landes was traveling out of the country after Shabbat, and wanted to see me before his departure. I had not seen him in five years. He knew what I was attempting. I had been summoned.

  When we arrived, Rabbi Landes’ wife, Sheryl, greeted us at the door and led us to the dining room table, where Rabbi Landes was seated – a curiously imposing and fiercely intellectual bear-of-a-man who was once described to me as a cross between Robert De Niro and Karl Marx. The dinner dishes were still out.

  After we had taken our chairs, he leaned over and said bluntly, “So, what’s the story?”

  “Now wait a minute, Danny,” Sheryl said, rising to clear the dishes, “I want to get some tea and dessert out before we get into his trip. Could we catch up with them first?”

  “Fine,” he replied in a gruff, playful manner, grinning over at his daughter. She had recently finished army service and was now completing her university studies. “How’s your family?” he asked me.

  While Sheryl bustled in the kitchen, we bid our time by running through the obvious topics of “what have you been doing with this” and “how are things going with that” until, dessert plates out, Rabbi Landes took his cue, leaned over again, and said bluntly, “What’s the story?”

  The story. I ran through it again. From Mohammad’s reported expression of remorse in 2002, to my attempt at securing a meeting with him in prison, to tomorrow’s visit with the Odeh family in East Jerusalem. When I finished, Rabbi Landes wasted no time. “I have two responses. First, as a rabbi, I want to ask: have you let anyone smart know where you will be tomorrow?”

  “Debbie and James know,” I replied.

  “No. I’m not talking about someone who’s good at analyzing mystical texts. I mean someone who knows what to do if you get into trouble.”

  “Umm. The exact details of where I’ll be and when? Kind of. Not exactly.”

  “Do you know someone who you could contact? Someone who knows things? Knows how to get you out of trouble if you were to find yourself in trouble?”

  “I do have a few contacts in the intelligence community who know what I’m doing. There is someone I could contact, I guess.”

  “Then this is my response as a rabbi: I’m giving you a heter to call someone tonight or tomorrow and let them know where you’ll be and when you expect to be back. Call someone and let them know. Promise me you will do this,” his finger pointed at my temple.

  I was numb. A heter is a legal allowance to do something that otherwise would be forbidden according to Jewish law, and which rabbis can grant on a case-by-case basis when the need arises. Using the phone on Shabbat is strictly prohibited, and doing so would be considered “breaking” the Sabbath, something only allowed in a life-and-death circumstance according to most traditional views. Meaning: Rabbi Landes thought my life might be on the line, and as a rabbi felt obligated to give one of the boldest, most radical legal pronouncements possible. He was imploring me to break Shabbat. The starkness of his words began to sink in. Julie looked over. He continued.

  “As for my commentary, I’ll say this: no private act is strictly private. In this context, it’s also public. I think you realize this.”

  I nodded. I did. It was the reason I had been so hesitant to inform my circle of friends from our time in Israel what I was doing – those friends who knew Marla and Ben, those who stood on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv as their bodies were loaded into the belly of a plane and flown to be buried in America. I didn’t want them to know I was attempting to speak with the enemy, and so I kept it private. I didn’t want them to think that I was switching sides. And so for the year that I had wrestled with Israeli authorities to gain a meeting with Mohammad while coming to terms with my need for some sort of reconciliation with the Odeh family, I mentioned my efforts to only a select few, and asked those who did know to keep it confidential. The whole effort was personal – psychological – not political, and I feared what people might think: that I was attempting to dilute the severity of what had happened at Hebrew University; that I was looking to excuse the murder of our friends by seeking to understand the murderer. I feared this because in Israel, the private is always public, always political, and actions, even those taken by ordinary citizens, have always been seen as more than actions, but as statements of position in a massive, national tug-of-war. On one side the smaller, liberal left screaming Human rights! and, on the other, conservatives and the religious right shouting Jewish survival! “Terror Victim Wants to Understand Family of Terrorist” spun differently becomes “Victim of Palestinian Liberation Effort Supports the Palestinian Uprising.”

  I nodded at Rabbi Landes, who looked at me and said, “I think you know that this meeting of yours tomorrow might become a public gesture. And that concerns me. I’m afraid that you might be taken advantage of.”

  “I understand. I really do. But you should know that I have no designs on forgiveness. I have no interest in excusing what happened. I simply want to try and understand who these people are. That’s all. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “We’re just worried about you, and want you to be safe,” said Sheryl.

  Safe. I wasn’t sure what safety meant any longer, overwhelmed by the official, rabbinic request to break Shabbat. By the implication that I needed to consider the political damage a visit with the Odeh family might bring. When Julie and I left, Rabbi Landes escorted us down five flights of steps and out to the building’s entrance – mirroring, as is traditionally done by some Jews, Abraham’s hospitality when angels visited him and Sarah to announce the impending birth of their son Isaac.

  When we were on the street, the night sky luminous and expansive, Julie and I looked at each other and breathed heavily. “Holy shit,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “That was intense.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, shaken, considering the impending meeting in East Jerusalem with the family of the man who had attempted to kill Jamie and had killed our friends. I didn’t know where they lived. Where exactly the neighborhood of Silwan was located. Whether I was being taken to meet a family, privately, or whether an entire village would be greeting me at the door, as Robi had suggested. Was I really going into this unknown landscape guided by a Palestinian translator and businessman I had yet to meet?

  “Are you still coming with me?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m coming. It’s why I’m here.”

  “Good. At least I won’t die alone.”

  Climbing the steep, olive tree-lined hill to the Tayelet, the knife jiggling in my pocket, I had thoughts of turning back, sweating through my wool sweater, laboring more than necessary as we neared the hill’s crest. The Dome of the Rock and the Old City, a mere mile away, appeared before us, floating on a current of antiquity, a current of impossible politics. The separation barrier wove across the horizon in the distance as Western, limestone high-rises nodded at the bleak collection of concrete homes crammed on the eastern side of the hills. It was the side into which we would soon descend, where smoke was rising from fires burning, somewhere, for some reason.

  The Tayelet is a stunning overlook, with a cobblestone walk that spans a quarter of a mile and a thin, green park running alongside it. As Julie and I walked, it became clear we had no idea where to meet Mariam. Would she be wandering the path, as we were now? If so, how would we recognize her among the crowds enjoying Shabbat, picnicking in the grass, playing Frisbee, walking dogs? We decided to head toward the northern-most parking lot. There we spotted a tall, sophisticated woman with dark curls, a black leather jacket, and wrap-around sunglasses standing on a short retaining wall, hands over her eyes, head swiveling back and forth, on the lookout.

  “That’s her,” I said, pointing.

  Julie nodded. “I think you’re right.” We walked over and stood before her.

  “Mariam?”

  “David,” she said sweetly, smiling, my name punctuated by
an Arabic inflection that made it sound like I was a beautiful, exotic flower. I exhaled. I trust her, I thought. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

  Julie extended her hand as I introduced her, told Mariam she’d be coming with us, if that was still okay.

  “Of course. Of course. Come, let us get into my car. I am sorry for the mess,” she said as we climbed into a silver Peugeot sedan, Julie taking the front and I the back.

  “We have to meet Fakhree before we go to the family,” Mariam said, picking up her cell phone as she hit reverse and turned left out of the parking lot toward East Jerusalem, with its fires and concrete and secrets – Fakhree the Silwan businessman who would be accompanying us, the one who the family trusted, his presence ensuring that the visit would be safe.

  “He’s not answering,” Mariam said, weaving around potholes as we snaked through a maze of Palestinian villages. Jabal Mukabar. Beit Sahur. The names were all unfamiliar.

  I pulled the toys out of my backpack and waved them before the rearview mirror. “Mariam, I bought some small toys for the children.” The miniature Rubik’s Cube and cheap stencil set bobbed in and out of her view. “Do you think it’s appropriate to give?”

  “Sure. Yes. Why not?”

  “I just didn’t know if it would be inappropriate or something that shouldn’t be done.”

  “I don’t know ‘inappropriate.’ You don’t need to. But if you want, then give.”

  The winding road cut through steep hills, with stone homes scattered sporadically along the edge. Julie pointed out the window at several groups of yarmulke-clad men trekking uphill, their tzitzit swaying.

  “Oh, you always see Jews walking here on Shabbat,” Mariam said indifferently.

  My mouth hung open as we passed the bearded, black-coat-wearing men out for a Shabbat stroll. How could they feel safe, walking on the edges of East Jerusalem wearing religious regalia? How could they be so brazen as to walk on the edge, each step an unspoken claim, each clap of the heel saying, “This, too, is ours?” Mariam didn’t give it a second’s thought as she began describing her job teaching English at the local Palestinian middle school. A cross dangled from the rear-view mirror. She’s not Muslim, I realized.