Maali knotted the blindfold. The man reached over and adjusted it, then rapped twice on the side of the van. Maali could hear the back doors being thrown open. Strong hands reached in and pulled her from the van. With someone gripping each elbow, she was led up stone steps and through a door, then up a long flight of metal steps and into a warm room, where she was shoved up against a wall. “Remove the blindfold,” a voice ordered in Arabic.
She tugged the blindfold down around her neck and immediately understood why the room seemed so warm; she was almost blinded by a bank of blazing spot lights trained directly on her. She could hear the soft buzz of whispering coming from shadowy figures in the back of the room. Then a man said, again in Arabic, “Yes, I’m absolutely sure she is the one I saw.”
Two muscular women in blue jeans and turtleneck sweaters started to push Maali toward the door. As she was being led away, someone carelessly turned off the spotlights before she was out of the room. A man cursed in Hebrew and one of the women jerked the blindfold up over her eyes, but it was too late; over her shoulder Maali had caught a glimpse of a stooped Arab hastily pulling his kiffiyeh up to cover his face. She could have sworn the man looked familiar—and then it came to her. Of course! It was Mr. Hajji, who had changed her Egyptian pounds into Israeli shekels at the Damascus Gate after her trip to Cairo.
Maali was hustled down a long corridor. She could hear metal doors clanging shut behind her and the voices of women whispering encouragement in Arabic from cells along the way. She was pushed through a door and instructed to remove the blindfold. Blinking, she found herself in a small, whitewashed room with a stainless steel table against a wall. One of the guards issued instructions in Hebrew, a language Maali understood but refused to speak. The prisoner was to strip to the skin. When Maali didn’t move, the woman arched her penciled brows. “What are you ashamed of?” she asked.
Maali had heard stories of how the Isra’ili police systematically humiliated their prisoners before they questioned them. She was determined to remain calm. “Am I arrested?” she asked, but instead of answering, her jailers once again gestured for her to disrobe.
A fat woman wearing white trousers and the white jacket of a medical worker entered the room. “You must do as they tell you,” she said in Arabic. “If you don’t take off your clothing, they will summon the men and instruct them to do it for you.”
Moving deliberately, Maali removed her garments and folded them one by one on the metal table until she finally stood naked in the middle of the room, with her right hand covering the ring on her left hand and her left hand covering her pubic hair. The woman pulled on a rubber glove and dipped her forefinger into a small jar filled with Vaseline. Then she motioned for the prisoner to bend over and grip her ankles. Tears spilled from Maali’s eyes as the two women jailers folded her over like a sheaf of paper. She sucked in air as the medical worker roughly probed her vagina and then her anus. Straightening, she snatched a formless gray shift flung at her by one of the guards and hastily pulled it over her head. The medical worker came around with a small cardboard box and pointed at the prisoner’s silver earrings. Maali took them off and dropped them into the box. The woman nodded at the gold locket around the girl’s neck and the rings on her hands. Maali’s heart sank as she worked her engagement ring, and then her wedding band, off her fingers and added them to the box. The woman pointed at the gold-colored ring on Maali’s fourth finger. Maali made a half-hearted attempt to remove it, and then shrugged. “It’s too tight,” she said.
“Rules are rules,” the woman said. She spread some Vaseline on the finger and worked the ring back and forth until it came free. She was about to drop it into the box when she noticed writing on the inside. Holding the ring up to the light, she sounded out the word. “E-ras-mus Hall.” She looked at Maali. “This is a strange ring for an Arab woman to be wearing. Where did you get it?”
TEN
AS THE SUN BURNED ITS WAY THROUGH LOW CLOUDS INTO THE Judean Hills, the recorded sing-song message summoning the faithful to the fourth prayer of the day echoed from the minaret of the El Omariye Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” cried the muezzin. “Come to prayer, come to prayer. Come to prosperity, come to prosperity. God is most great, God is most great. There is no god but Allah.” In the safe-house off Christian Quarter Road, only accessible by a maze of alleys and staircases and rooftop passageways, the Doctor prostrated himself before the mihrab, the niche cut into the wall to indicate the direction of the Kaaba built by the Messenger Ibrahim at the heart of the holy city of Mecca. Drumming his bruised forehead against the cracked Moorish floor tiles, savoring the pain, he recited the opening verse of the Qur’an: “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Praise belongs to God, Lord of all Being, the All-merciful, the All-compassionate, the Master of the Day of Doom. Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succor. Guide us in the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast blessed.”
Next to the door reinforced with steel plating, the young Bedouin woman known as Petra sat before a green Israeli field radio, monitoring military and police wavelengths through headphones. She was wearing blue jeans under her embroidered Bedouin robe. A kerchief was thrown loosely over her short hair. Two AK-47s, along with several gas masks and a carton filled with loaded clips and hand grenades, were within arm’s reach. Across the room, a large British Mandate map of Palestine, with place names in Arabic, was taped to the wall over a bricked-in window. On the kitchen table that doubled as a desk, glass paperweights with snow scenes from Switzerland weighed down stacks of newspaper clippings and messages.
Seeing that the Doctor had almost finished his prayers, Petra, who spoke Hebrew like a native Israeli and had been disguised as a Haredi when the Rabbi’s convoy was flagged down near the Zohar Reservoir, removed the headset, which pinched her ears, and set out a pot of sweet tea and honey cakes on a low table to mark the end of the day’s Ramadan fast. Settling cross-legged onto a Bedouin cushion before the low table, the Doctor poured himself a steaming cup of tea and blew noisily across the surface to cool it. Leaning over the table, cupping his hand to collect the crumbs, he nibbled on one of the cakes and swallowed an amphetamine capsule with his first gulp of tea. Across the room, in front of the mihrab, Yussuf Abu Saleh sank to his knees and began the evening’s recitation of the Qur’an; each night of Ramadan he read aloud a thirtieth of the holy book in order to finish on the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast that marked the end of the holy month. “God knows well your enemies,” he intoned.
Some of the Jews pervert words from their meaning … twisting with their tongues and traducing religion. If they had said, “We have heard and obey” … it would have been better for them, and more upright; but God has cursed them for their unbelief …
Finishing his break-fast, the Doctor walked over to the laundry sink in the corner. Letting the water run, he removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his robe and carefully scrubbed both of his hands and wrists and forearms to the elbows with soap and a brush, then raised his hands above his head and shook them dry. Slipping back into his jacket, he nodded to Petra, who came over and turned the faucet off for him.
Pushing open the thick reinforced door with the soft toe of his shoe, leaving the door ajar behind him, the Doctor made his way into a rectangular room illuminated day and night by a single 150-watt bulb suspended from a braided electric cord. The two armed guards, the el-Tel brothers, Azziz and Aown—one lounged on an Army cot under a bricked-in window while the other straddled a kitchen chair back-to-front and surveyed the prisoners—saluted the Doctor with grins; the youngest of the two, Azziz, leaped to his feet and spun the chair around so that the Doctor could sit on it in the normal way.
Picking at a crumb lodged between two teeth, the Doctor sat down on the kitchen chair, removed his thick wire-rimmed spectacles and meticulously cleaned the lenses with the hem of his long robe. His eyes, as usual, were bloodshot and swollen from fatigue. For the Doct
or, there were not enough hours in the day, or days in a lifetime, which is why he kept himself awake with amphetamines. Replacing his spectacles, squinting through them to bring objects into focus, he studied the two prisoners, their heads covered with thick leather hoods, sleeping in the heavy wooden chairs set away from the wall with the Palestinian flag and the Ghazeh Central Import-Export Bank calendar. The short-sleeved shirt, the calendar had been Yussuf’s bright idea: if you dropped enough hints that the Rabbi was being held prisoner in Ghazeh, so he had reasoned, the Jews would eventually conclude that we were trying to convince them he wasn’t in Ghazeh and decide that he was. Yussuf’s ruse seemed to have thrown the Isra’ilis off the scent; the public declarations on Isra’ili television and radio, as well as private intelligence reports reaching the Doctor from Ghazeh, indicated that the Jews were convinced the missing men were somewhere in the Strip. And Petra, monitoring the Isra’ili wavelengths, could detect no unusual police or Army activity in the Jerusalem area.
The ankles of both prisoners were lashed to the thick legs of the chairs, their wrists handcuffed in front of them. The younger of the two Jews slumped in his seat, his breath coming in frightened rasps. Rabbi Apfulbaum sat erect, his chin nodding onto his chest and jerking back up under the hood.
The Doctor leaned forward and pulled the hood from the Rabbi’s head. Then, striking a wooden match, he held the flame to the tip of a rough Palestinian Farid and dragged on the cigarette in short, agitated puffs, as if he was smoking for the first time in his life. Defying gravity, the ash grew longer than the cigarette until it finally broke off and drifted down onto the lapels of his double-breasted suit jacket. The Doctor, staring intently at his prisoner, didn’t appear to notice the ashes. The foul-smelling smoke must have irritated the Rabbi, because he leaned away and, raising his manacled wrists, waved the back of one hand to dispel it. “In America,” he remarked in Arabic, his eyes straining to make out his captor, “they print on the packs that cigarette smoking is hazardous for your health.”
The Doctor grunted. “Being an Islamist in a Zionist-occupied country is hazardous for your health,” he said in Hebrew. “Being right when everyone around you is wrong is hazardous for your health.” He summoned a cheerless laugh from the depths of his gut. “In any case the question is academic because, as the holy Qur’an tells us, nobody lives a fraction of a second longer than God gives him to live.” He reached out and grasped the Rabbi’s bony wrist and felt for his pulse. After a moment, still talking in Hebrew, he commented, “All things considered, you appear to be in satisfactory health. How old are you?”
“Fifty-three,” the Rabbi responded in Arabic.
“Do you have a family history of high or low blood pressure? Fainting? Heart trouble?”
“Min fadlikoum,” the Rabbi said testily in Arabic. “Please. Stop this farce of inquiring about the health of someone you are going to put to death.”
Switching to English, the Doctor said, “It is awkward, your talking Arabic, my talking Hebrew. I propose, ya’ani, that we meet on the no-man’s land of English.”
Apfulbaum’s tongue flicked nervously over his parched lips. He sensed he had won the first skirmish. “We will talk in English if it suits you. But let’s not delude ourselves—between us there can be no such thing as a no-man’s land. We both want the same splinter of Holy Land, and I mean to have it.”
The doctor smiled coldly. “You are what the Isra’ili newspapers call a maximalist, ya’ani. For you, there is no question of compromise. All or nothing is your creed. I myself am ready to negotiate an equitable settlement. I am ready to permit the Jews born in Palestine before 1948 to remain in the Islamic state I mean to create on the condition they convert to Islam.”
“And the others?”
“They can go to hell, ya’ani.”
The Rabbi’s riotous brows danced above his bulging eyes. “Here, at last, is a charter member of the Amalek Liberation Organization,” he cried excitedly to his secretary. He spun back to his interrogator. “Okay, okay, cards on the table. God promised Abraham and his descendants, me among them, all the land from the brook of Egypt, which we call the Nile, to the great river Euphrates. Contrary to published reports I consider myself a minimalist, inasmuch as I am prepared to settle for less than God offered Abraham; I, too, am willing to negotiate an equitable settlement, one giving the Jews everything between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. When we’ve digested that, say in thirty or fifty years, we’ll phone you up and make an appointment and raise the subject of the Euphrates.”
The Doctor played the game. “What do you propose to do with the Palestinians who already live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan?”
Apfulbaum snorted contemptuously. “They can emigrate to Syria, which is worse than hell, ya’ani. The Jewish people occupy one sixth of one per cent of all Arab land, what Lord Balfour called ‘a small notch’ when he set it aside in 1917 for a Jewish state. I tell you frankly, the angels will abandon heaven to sell used Egyptian cars in Tel Aviv; God—blessed be His name—will turn up as a television anchor man before anyone takes a thimbleful of this sacred soil away from us.”
Leaning against a wall, Azziz watched the two nearly blind men eyeing each other with a wordless fury. He wondered how long the prisoners would remain alive; he wondered how long he and his brother would remain alive. He had once confided to his brother that he could feel the temperature of the air rise the instant the Doctor entered a room; his almost sightless eyes seemed to burn with a fierce anger, which he kept bottled up inside him. He rarely lost his temper, though it would have been better if he let some of the anger seep out from time to time. Even those, like Azziz, who considered themselves disciples of the Doctor and suspected he was the long-awaited Renewer were secretly terrified of his anger. They knew from experience that it could erupt into savage violence at any moment; they knew they as well as the Jews could become its victims if the Doctor decided their deaths would serve his cause.
In the strained silence, the soft voice of Yussuf reading from the Qur’an could be heard.
Whosoever obeys God, and the Messenger—they are with those whom God has blessed, Prophets, just men, martyrs, the righteous.
Petra slipped into the room with a cup of green tea and offered it to the Rabbi. Wrapping both hands around the cup, Apfulbaum brought the tea to his lips, all the while squinting over it at his interrogator. “I seem to have misplaced my eyeglasses. It probably happened in the excitement of the attack on my car.”
“When I was a student at the American University of Beirut a lifetime ago,” the Doctor said, “I picked up some colloquial Arabic. When a Lebanese Arab conquers an enemy he says, ‘I broke his eye.’” The Doctor felt the cigarette singe his lips and quickly dropped it on the floor. “I broke your eye, ya’ani.” His long fingers played with a loose button on his jacket. “I see now that I am going to enjoy our conversations. I will admit something that will surprise you: I have never before spoken seriously with a Jew I wasn’t afraid of, which is understandable since the great majority of the Jews I talked to were my interrogators or my torturers or my judges or my jailers. I spent twelve years in Jewish prisons. Twelve years, ya’ani! Every conversation with a Jew was an ordeal. I was afraid they would take away my spectacles, without which I, too, am virtually blind; I was afraid they would take away my books or my cigarette ration or my right to one visitor a month. I was afraid they would kick the chair out from under me and then smile politely and ask me if I had slept well the night before. There were times, I tell you openly, when I was afraid they would kill me; there were others when I feared they would not.”
The Rabbi couldn’t restrain himself. “One confidence deserves another. I have never before had a serious conversation with an Arab who wasn’t afraid of me; who wasn’t eager to assist me, to ingratiate himself with me, to guide me, to agree with me.”
The Doctor pushed himself to his feet. “For too long you Jews have seen every Palestinian, every Muslim,
as a terrorist. Now you have the good fortune to be confronted with a real flesh-and-blood terrorist, someone come to life from your nightmares to wage holy war for Allah and for Islam. Even without eyeglasses, ya’ani, even without sight, you can learn from the experience. If you look with your broken eyes you will see something deeper than terrorism: a yearning to serve God and do His will.”
Apfulbaum had a sudden vision of himself as a bar mitzva boy, sitting at the enormous table in the Brooklyn yeshiva, his feet barely reaching the floor, delivering outrageous answers to his Rabbi’s Talmudic questions. “Who does he think he is,” the old Rabbi had complained on more than one occasion, “the Messiah?” Now, face to face with a Muslim terrorist, Apfulbaum couldn’t resist the urge to shock him. “With my broken eyes I see a crazy follower of a crazy religion.”
Efrayim wheezed for air under his leather hood. Thinking that the young man was suffocating, the Doctor reached over and snatched the hood off his head. Gasping, the secretary stared in terror at his jailer. Turning back toward Apfulbaum, the Doctor’s fingers stole toward his breast pocket and settled on the pearl handle of his pistol; he contemplated shooting the Rabbi out of hand for his blasphemy, but the admonition in the Qur’an came as if by magic into his head. “Act you according to your station … watch and wait.” He withdrew his hand. “All religions, even yours, ya’ani, appear at first glance to be crazy. Explain how Yahweh could give Moses His instructions at the burning bush one minute, and then try to murder him for no reason under the sun the next. Explain why your God punishes Adam and Eve for a single transgression and drowns mankind in a great flood for some vague offense, and then commends the generosity of Joseph for forgiving his brothers who sold him into slavery. It is this craziness, or put another way, this larger-than-life-ness, this irreducibility to man-measured logic, that gives to Islam its intrinsic beauty. We shall talk again tomorrow night after my colleagues and I have broken the Ramadan fast. We shall talk every night. I will ask you about your community of Beit Avram. I will ask you about the Jewish underground movement, of which you are said to be the spiritual leader. I will ask you about the Jewish terrorist who signs himself by the name of Ya’ir when he takes credit for the assassinations of Palestinians.”
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