“Have you had a high fever in the past few days?”
Again she said no.
“When you grit your teeth, do you feel pain in the ear? Ah, I thought so. You are suffering from dermatitis of the outer ear. It is not serious. I will give you antibiotic drops to use in the ear. You should apply a heated compress and take aspirin to alleviate the pain.”
Hurrying from the clinic through the back door minutes later, his long bamboo cane tapping nervously ahead of his flying feet, the Doctor made his way through a labyrinth of back alleys off Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Road. He went up a rickety staircase and ducked through a low door with “No Entrance—Building Condemned” painted in red on it, then climbed out a window onto a slate roof. Guiding himself with a hand on a waist-high brick wall, he crossed several rooftops and descended a flight of steps and crossed another roof before coming to the abandoned bathhouse with the narrow staircase at the back leading to the safe house on the third floor. “Everything in order?” the Doctor asked Petra when she unlocked the reinforced door and let him in. “Where’s Yussuf?”
A quarter of an hour before the Doctor returned from the clinic, Yussuf had climbed onto the toilet seat in the tiny lavatory to look out of the only window in the safe house that had not been bricked over. Using binoculars, he had spotted the green shirt drying on the clothesline of a roof, the signal that someone had left a letter with the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque. “Yussuf’s off collecting the mail,” Petra told the Doctor.
“Anything on the radio?”
She shook her head. “The Jews chased a stolen car on the Nablus Road. When they caught up with it they discovered it wasn’t stolen after all—a reserve colonel had borrowed it to return to his unit without telling the owner.”
Washing his hands and feet, sinking to his knees before the mihrab, the Doctor prostrated himself four times, drumming his forehead against the tiles as he lost himself in the prayer: Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Later, Petra set out a break-fast of tea and biscuits, and then unexpectedly poured herself a cup of tea and joined the Doctor at the low table.
With exquisite timidity, she breathed his name. “Isma’il al-Shaath.”
Startled—he didn’t remember Petra ever using his given name before—he turned toward her inquisitively.
“There is an old Islamic tradition which holds,” she whispered, her eyes carefully avoiding his, her fingers picking lint off the front of her Bedouin robe, “that in an ideal marriage, the wife should be half the husband’s age plus seven.”
The Doctor knew that Petra was an orphan, and assumed she was about to ask his permission to marry. “I am familiar with this formulation,” he told her.
“Do you think there is any truth to it?”
“Half the husband’s age plus seven gives to each partner in the marriage contract an important element: to the man, a young and eager wife over whom he will exercise a natural authority based on age and experience; to the woman, a mature father-figure who can guide her in all things, and in whom she can have confidence.”
“Yussuf showed me a magazine article about the free clinic you organized in the Old City. It stated that you were forty-six years of age. I myself am thirty years of age.” Petra steeled herself with a deep breath. “Thirty is half forty-six plus seven.”
The Doctor, flustered, dipped a biscuit into his tea and held it there. “I do not know how to respond,” he said, for once at a loss for words.
“Say nothing. Only consider the possibility of my becoming your wife. I must tell you that I am not a virgin; I was once betrothed to an inspector of water mains who was swept into a wadi during a rain squall and drowned before we could marry. At the time I was not following the straight path ordained by the Messenger and permitted the consummation of the relationship to take place once the engagement was published. On the positive side, I am in excellent health and reasonably attractive despite the small pox scars on my face. In addition, I have been promised a dowry by my brothers.” Petra’s hands trembled, her voice faded in and out, then faltered. Breathing deeply through her open mouth, she pushed herself to continue. “I realize that for someone of your station it may sound insignificant, but they speak of twenty camels, half of them female, and a portion of date trees in an oasis on the Jordanian side of Wadi Araba.”
“I am already married.”
“The holy Qur’an permits a man to take in marriage four wives.”
The Doctor quoted the Qur’an on the matter of wives. “‘If you fear you will not be equitable, then only one.’” And he said, very gently, “I fear I will not be equitable, in the sense that I have neither the time nor the energy for more than the one wife I am already contracted to.” Bowing his head, he whispered, “I am married to the cause of Islam. I am engaged in a war on two fronts, the first against the external enemies of Islam, the infidels; the second against the internal enemies of Islam, who seek accommodation with the Crusaders. The second struggle is the more important of the two, for the victor will be the one to define Islam for centuries to come.”
Petra thought about this for a moment. “Even in the service of Islam, a man is known to have”—she racked her brain for an appropriate expression—“physical needs …”
“You are more than a wife to me, dear Petra. You are a holy warrior and an accomplice in the battle to bring this sacred land, and the world, into the straight path, the way of God, to whom belongs all things that are in the heavens and all that are on earth.”
After a moment she murmured, “I pray that I have not offended you.”
“You have honored me, not offended me.”
Petra noticed that the biscuit had disintegrated in the Doctor’s tea, and the tea was no longer steaming. “I will pour another cup for you,” she said.
With the tips of his fingers, the Doctor touched the rope burns on the back of her wrist; the Isra’ilis had once suspended her from the branch of a tree when they caught her throwing rotten tomatoes at a jeep. “Accept my thanks,” he said huskily. And he added quickly, “For the tea.”
“You are welcome, Isma’il al-Shaath.” A melancholy smile worked its way onto Petra’s pock-marked face. “For the tea.”
Yussuf came in, handed Petra a letter to decode from the Abu Bakr cell in Ghazeh and took his place before the niche in the wall indicating the direction of Mecca. He thumbed through the Qur’an to find the marker he had left in its pages. As the Doctor removed his jacket and, rolling up the sleeves of his robe, started scrubbing his hands and forearms, Yussuf began reading where he had left off the previous evening:
O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them.
Shaking his hands dry in the air, climbing back into his suit jacket, the Doctor had Petra read him the message from Ghazeh. The Palestine Authority police were quietly spreading word that they were ready to pay fifty thousand American dollars for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the abduction of Rabbi Apfulbaum and his secretary, and a second fifty thousand American dollars for information leading to the liberation of the prisoners. The Abu Bakr cell had also detected an increase in contacts between the Palestinian police and Isra’ili agents; dozens of homes of fundamentalist leaders had been raided by search parties believe to include Isra’ilis disguised as Palestinians. The Doctor took this in, then, as an afterthought, checked to be sure Petra had been salting the Rabbi’s food with doses of caffeine and giving him cups of tea brewed from rose hips, which was rich in vitamin C and tended to keep people awake when drunk late in the day.
Entering the back room of the safe house, the Doctor discovered Azziz pulling the secretary Efrayim back to his chair. “The Yahoud”—Azziz spit out “Jew” as if the word left a bad taste in his mouth—“has diarrhea.” The young Palestinian slipped the leather hood over Efrayim’s head. “He has been to the toilet half a dozen times today.”
“He suffers from the fear
of death,” the Doctor said in Arabic, settling onto the kitchen chair in front of the Rabbi, holding a match to the tip of one of his pungent Farids, sucking it into life with shallow, nervous puffs. “I will have some weak tea prepared to prevent dehydration, and rice to solidify his bowels.” He pulled the leather hood off the Rabbi’s head, then reached for his wrist and checked his pulse. Venturing onto the no-man’s land of English, he remarked, “Your heart is beating more normally today.”
The Rabbi, delivered from the stench of the hood, opened his mouth and filled his lungs with great gulps of air. “I don’t sleep,” he admitted. He wasn’t complaining; he was merely stating a fact. “It is not the fear of death that keeps me awake. It is not even the foul-smelling hood you put over my head. The food I eat, the tea I drink is spiked; I can tell from the taste. Rose hips. Vitamin C. Enough to keep a horse from falling asleep. When I do manage to doze off, one of the two goons”—with a contemptuous toss of his head, Apfulbaum indicated Azziz and Aown, who were sitting on the cot grinning—“yells an obscenity in my ear or kicks at the legs of the chair.” The Rabbi lifted both hands, still bound in cuffs, and ran his fingers through his hair, which was flying off in all directions. “Exhausting me will achieve nothing,” Apfulbaum blurted out. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” He took several more deep breaths and continued on a calmer note. “You have surely proposed trading us for two or twenty or two hundred Palestinian terrorists rotting in Israeli jails. We both of us know what will happen. The Israelis will offer to negotiate. To buy time, they will even ask the Egyptians or the Jordanians to mediate. But in the end they will never reward hostage taking by agreeing to a swap of prisoners. I understand how these things work—you will have given them a deadline. When it arrives, you will execute us.”
Efrayim, following the conversation from his chair, moaned, “For God’s sake, Rabbi, don’t put crazy ideas into his head.”
The Rabbi reached out and gripped the Doctor’s knee. “Make no mistake, I prefer to survive; you have to be off your rocker to choose death over life. On the other hand, maybe my murder will scuttle this infernal charade of a peace treaty. Maybe.” Sitting back, Apfulbaum snorted. “The choice is between no peace on, God forbid, half the land God promised Abraham, and no peace on all the land. When the Jews understand this, they will opt for no peace on all the land.”
“Every time I come in here and listen to you rattle on about the Messenger Ibrahim,” the Doctor said with quiet intensity, “I have the sensation of mining a seam of madness.”
“It’s you who’s insane,” the Rabbi retorted. He raised his right hand, dragging his left hand after it at the end of the chain, and waved it above his head. “You and your Imams and Ayatollahs and fundamentalist kamikazes who blow up innocent Jews on buses, you’re all meshuga, patzo, off your rockers; you’re all stark raving maniacs.”
Breathing noisily through his nostrils, Apfulbaum melted back into the chair. After a moment the Doctor cleared his throat. “Let us begin tonight’s conversation, ya’ani, by talking about the Jewish underground movement Keshet Yonathan in the Isra’ili occupied West Bank. In the mid nineteen-eighties, your own police arrested twenty-seven members of a Jewish terrorist cell, based on the West Bank, who were plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock Mosque. The same people were accused of murdering three Palestinian students at Hebron’s Islamic College, and maiming two Palestinian West Bank mayors, Bassam Shaka and Karim Khalef, with letter bombs. Curiously, this initial burst of Jewish underground activity roughly coincided with your arrival in Isra’il and the founding of the settlement of Beit Avram. It is well known that the Isra’ili Shin Bet picked you up for questioning on half a dozen occasions. No charges were ever brought against you for lack of hard evidence, so the Jewish police claimed. But you were an outspoken advocate of—”
“—outspoken is the understatement of the year. I’ve shouted it from the rooftops until I was blue in the face. Jews have no choice in the matter: we are under a sacred obligation to settle in the land God gave us, what you call the occupied West Bank and the Torah calls Samaria and Judea.” The Rabbi added tiredly, “All that is a matter of record.”
“Your attachment to the central spine of hills in the country of Palestine, your habit of referring to these areas by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria, is nothing more than a kind of fossilized nostalgia, a theological mania bordering on hysteria. You speak of an aching for the land. Before Hitler appeared on the scene, Zionism was only able to produce a trickle of Jews willing to settle in the Holy Land, and the great majority of those insisted on living along the coast. As painful as it may be for you to acknowledge, the conclusion is inescapable: Hitler, and not Ibrahim, must be seen as the founding father of the modern state of Israel. Without the Holocaust, ya’ani, the Jews would still be living in their ghettos in Eastern Europe. The psychological conclusion one must draw is that you have no core identity; you don’t exist. The Frenchman Sartre hit the nail on the head when he wrote: ‘The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew … it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.’”
“If anyone doesn’t exist,” the Rabbi cried, leaning forward and squinting in order to better make out the shadowy figure taunting him, “it is the Palestinians. Palestinian nationalism is an artificial flavoring; it’s saccharine, as opposed to sugar. In the history of the planet earth, there never was a Palestinian people; Palestine itself belonged to southern Syria. You have been seduced by your own spin doctors into thinking there is such a thing as a Palestinian nation.”
“Once again you stand history on its head—”
The Rabbi was warming to his subject. “Admit it if you dare, you are lucky to have Jews for enemies. Who today gives a flying fart for the Kurds struggling against the Turks, or the Berbers against the Algerians, or the Tibetans against the Chinese? If a Russian shoots a Chechen teenager hurling stones, does the BBC interrupt its program for a special bulletin? Don’t hold your breath! But you so-called Palestinians are struggling against Jews, and the world is mesmerized.” The Rabbi sniffed in manic delight. “We are the world’s longest running sit-tra.”
“Sit-tra?”
From under his hood, Efrayim said, “Sit-tra is an Apfulbaumism. It’s the opposite of sit-com. It means situation tragedy.”
Apfulbaum elaborated. “Tune in tomorrow, same time, same station, to see what the chosen people, the descendants of prophets and psalmists and a light unto the nations, see what they’ll do now that they’re no longer the eternal victims. Will they turn out to be like the Americans ethnically cleansing native Indians? Or the French Catholics flinging Protestants into rivers with stones tied to their ankles? Oh, the columnists can barely wait to find out. If Israel uses its power to fulfill the biblical promise to Abraham, the world will wring its hands in an ecstasy of masturbatory satisfaction. You Jews have been boring us to tears for three thousand years with all this blah-blah-blah about morality, the Sartres of the world will bleat like goats, but when push comes to shove, ha! you’re like everyone else. The Sartres, the others glued to the Middle East sit-tra on their TVs will feel less guilty for having done nothing to prevent the Holocaust. Absolutely nothing,” the Rabbi muttered several times, as if he were reminding himself of some terrible truth. “Zilch. Zero.”
Lost in meditation, the Doctor let several minutes slip by without saying a word. Finally he looked up. “It is true that we Palestinians owe you Jews a debt, though you are the last ones in the world to understand the real nature of this debt. If today we define ourselves as Palestinians, it is because you came here with your Western money and Western technology and Western music and Western art and looked at us as if we didn’t exist; you looked through us. You saw Palestinians as a drop in a sea of Arabs stretching from Morocco to Iraq, without cultural or historical links to the land of Palestine.”
The Doctor stood up and turned around his seat several times to stretch his legs, then sat down again. “You have a lot to unlearn, Rabbi. You need instruc
tion.”
“Instruct, instruct.” He frowned at a thought. “I am what you could call a captive audience.”
The Doctor’s voice took on an abrasive edge; he sounded as if he were singing slightly off key. “I will instruct you, ya’ani. I will teach you that there is not one Arab, and not one way of being Arab. I will teach you that, more often than not, things in the Middle East are the opposite of what they seem: it isn’t a question of winning or losing wars, but how you win the wars you win, which is something you Jews never—never!—grasped. Take the Sixty-seven war. You swept Arab planes from the skies and three Arab armies from the fields of battle. But you didn’t see then, you don’t see now, that this so-called victory was a great defeat for Israel.”
Apfulbaum rolled his eyes in their sockets.
“Yes, I tell you it was a great defeat. Before Sixty-seven, the struggle was between the Jews who had washed up on our shores and the invisible Palestinians living in their midst. After Sixty-seven, after you conquered Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islam, after you occupied its sacred shrines, after you humiliated Muslim pride and Muslim faith, the conflict turned into a struggle between the world’s fifteen million Jews and a billion followers of Islam. How can you not see it, ya’ani? After Sixty-seven, our bodies were in Isra’ili-occupied territory but our heads and our hearts were in Palestine. And now, after our intifadas shook your confidence, you are ready to throw us a few crumbs—you are ready to give us a mini state of our own on a small part of the land that was always ours, with the big Jewish brother breathing down our necks. And you expect us to lick your hand in gratitude. The Palestinian Authority may leap at the opportunity but not me—I don’t want a miserable and truncated Palestinian state on the West Bank and Ghazeh. What do I care about the West Bank or Ghazeh? Until they were expelled by the Jews, my family lived in Haifa. I want Haifa! I want Jaffa. I want all of Jerusalem. Every square centimeter. I want the complete elimination of the Jewish entity the West imposed on us. If we ratify the existence of the Jewish state by accepting this peace, we will have lost the hundred-year struggle against Zionism. I don’t want peace for the simple reason that without peace, the Jews can’t win. Time is on our side. You will drown in a sea of Arabs. With God’s help, we will look back on the Jews the way we look back on the Crusaders crushed by Salah ad-Din—as a minor episode in Islamic history.”
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