Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  Maali’s knees turned weak and she had difficulty keeping herself from sliding off the stool. “The man who is pushed to cut a ring from the hand of a dead Jew is someone who has suffered at the hands of a living Jew,” she blurted out.

  The interrogator said with unnerving patience, “So you admit that someone cut the finger from the hand of Ronni Goldman to get the ring, which he then gave to you?”

  “I admit nothing,” Maali cried. “I curse your eyes. I spit at your feet.”

  Shivering on the cot in her icy cell after the evening meal had been pushed through the slot in the door later that night, Maali scratched at the rash on her stomach until it bled. The warder who checked the occupants of the cells every hour on the hour noticed blood on the front of her shift and summoned two Israeli woman guards, who walked her through the labyrinthine corridors to the infirmary. The Jewish woman doctor who was on duty, appalled at Maali’s condition, had her strip to the skin and shower with a special soap. The doctor, a young draftee on her first tour of duty in a prison, cleaned the rash with antiseptic and treated it with an antibiotic cream, and issued Maali new underwear and a new shift with long sleeves. Waiting for the two woman guards to return, the doctor gave Maali a small plastic comb and a plastic container filled with vitamins.

  “Shoukran,” Maali murmured in Arabic.

  “Bavakasha,” the doctor answered, avoiding the prisoner’s eye. “If the rash still bothers you tomorrow, ask to be brought back to the infirmary.” She became impatient when the woman guards didn’t show up and summoned the Palestinian orderly who sat at a small table outside the infirmary door logging everyone in and out. “Take her back to Cell Block four,” the doctor instructed the orderly.

  Maali fell into step alongside the Palestinian, a young woman whose thick tresses had been hacked short in what looked like a botched prison haircut. Moving her lips like a ventriloquist, keeping her eyes trained straight ahead, the orderly murmured, “What are you arrested for?”

  “They think I killed a Jew,” Maali said, suddenly proud of the charge against her.

  They turned a corner and passed a control point. The Israeli guard behind the window recognized the orderly and waved her on.

  “How did they catch you?” the orderly asked.

  “I was denounced.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Mr. Hajji, the one who changes money at the Damascus Gate.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “It was Mr. Hajji who confirmed the identification when I was brought in by the Isra’ilis. I saw him with my own eyes.”

  “The Holy Qur’an prescribes execution, crucifixion, amputation or exile for those who wage war against Allah and his Messenger, and sow corruption on earth. Surely Mr. Hajji will not escape the judgment of God or man.”

  They approached a steel door guarded by a young Israeli woman soldier wearing black Reebok sneakers and holding an Uzi submachine gun. She gestured for the prisoner to raise her arms and slowly ran the palms of her hands over Maali’s breasts and thighs and buttocks. She discovered the plastic comb and vitamin pills in a pocket and confiscated them before waving the prisoner through the door.

  “Are you familiar with the passage in the Holy Qur’an entitled The Woman Tested?” the orderly breathed as they approached Maali’s cell. “‘Pray to Allah, who answers all prayers. Resist the infidel with your soul and your body and your brain. Remember that God sees the things you do.’”

  Maali entered her foul-smelling cell; she had grown accustomed to the odors coming from the open toilet in the far corner. The orderly started to shut the door behind her. “Take heart—Mr. Hajji will rot in hell,” she whispered before the door slammed closed. “Take heart—water like molten copper will scald the collaborator’s face.”

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  Turns out that my one-time Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger got it dead wrong when he observed that the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. This may be true in the real world; in the Looking-Glass miasma of the Middle East, the absence of alternatives only seems to befuddle minds even more. My telephone call to the Chairman of the Palestinian authority this morning is a case in point. Before I could get a word in, he was lecturing me on how he wasn’t going to make the mistake of letting himself be seen cooperating with the Israeli Shin Bet to capture Palestinians—even though they had broken the cease fire he endorsed, even though they were jeopardizing the peace treaty he was ready to sign.

  I let him ramble on for a while. When he came up for air I said, very casually, “What are your alternatives?”

  When he started to tick them off, one by one, I interrupted. “Mr. Chairman, let me tell you how we see your alternatives from Washington,” I told him. “You have none.”

  I let that sink in. “Everyone always has alternatives,” he finally said. “To start with, I can sit back and let the Isra’ilis solve their own problems.”

  “Frankly, I thought you were too shrewd to consider that an alternative. Put yourself in Israeli shoes. What happens when Abu Bakr murders the secretary and the Rabbi? What then?”

  “I telephoned the Isra’ili Prime Minister when this began. I suggested that he should follow your President’s advice and treat the kidnapping as an isolated incident—”

  “It’s an isolated incident if the perpetrators don’t get away with murder. If they do, it’s not an isolated incident because they will draw the inevitable conclusions and perpetrate again—and again, and again until your nerves, and those of the Israelis, crack. Don’t forget that the Prime Minister has 240,000 right-wing settlers looking over his shoulder—they would welcome an excuse to scuttle the Mt. Washington peace treaty before it can be signed.”

  “What does it mean, scuttle?”

  “Sink. Wreck. Ruin. Destroy. Kill.”

  There must have been others in the room with the Chairman listening in on our conversation, because I heard someone whispering to him in Arabic. I asked, with what I hoped was a reasonable amount of sarcasm in my voice, “What did he say?”

  He cleared his throat, which I took to mean that he wasn’t as calm as he sounded. “He asks how is it we always seem to end up with you Americans pushing us to help the Isra’ilis crack down on Palestinians.”

  “I’ll answer his question with a question: How is it you people don’t see that this Abu Bakr is as much an enemy of the Palestinian Authority as he is of Israel? Come to think of it, maybe even more of an enemy.”

  “How more? Why more?”

  “With the Israelis, he will consider the operation a success if he kills two of them; he will consider it a triumph if the Israelis don’t turn up in Washington to sign the peace treaty. With you, he’ll consider it a success if the murder of the two Israelis causes you embarrassment; he’ll consider it a triumph if he and the other fundamentalists can kill you and govern in your place.”

  I could hear him arguing with someone in Arabic. I made a mental note to have an Arab-speaker with me next time I put a call in to the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority. After a moment he came back on the line. “I tell you frankly, Mr. Sawyer, I do not disagree with your analysis. But in this part of the world there is a big difference between analyzing a situation correctly and taking a public position on it.”

  “Let me put another question, Mr. Chairman: What would you do if Israeli right-wingers kidnapped a crazy fundamentalist Imam and his secretary, killing four of their bodyguards in the process? Would you agree to treat the kidnapping as an isolated incident?”

  He laughed under his breath; one of the things I appreciated about the Chairman was his occasional ability to stand back and see himself and the Palestinians as others might see them. Empathy is the mother of self-knowledge. “I would dial your number in Washington,” the Chairman conceded, “and ask you to put pressure on the Isra’ilis to bring the culprits to justice. I would do this knowing full well the Isra’ilis would be in no great hurry—”

&n
bsp; “Mr. Chairman, when the Mt. Washington treaty is signed, your two peoples will have to find ways to live with each other on your postage stamp of a territory.”

  “We have signed treaties with the Isra’ilis before and look what happened. Remember Oslo? They built additional settlements and expanded the existing ones. They constructed a network of security roads that crisscrossed Palestine, effectively cutting it into isolated enclaves. They built so-called security walls, cutting Palestinians off from access to hospitals and universities and jobs and the fields they farmed. They dragged their feet about giving back territory. We are afraid history will repeat itself.” I could hear the Chairman being interrupted again by one of his aides. When he came back on the line he said, “Perhaps it would be wiser to put off any decisions in this matter until tomorrow.”

  I have a Pablo Picasso quotation I used from time to time to impress my students at Harvard. I came up with it now. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” I never did get to gauge the effect of my erudition on the Chairman because the line suddenly filled with static, and then went stone dead.

  I didn’t ask the White House operators to reestablish the connection. I had made the points I wanted to make and decided to stand on ceremony—having initiated the first conversation, I felt it was his place to call me back.

  He never did.

  SEVENTEEN

  BARUCH PICKED UP ELIHU AT THE MILITARY AIRPORT AND headed back to Jerusalem on the Ramallah Road, turning east on the four-lane security highway that skirted the sprawling hilltop Israeli city-settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. As they started downhill toward Jericho, Elihu finally broke the silence. “Lousy flight,” he muttered, answering the question he felt Baruch ought to have asked. “Ran into traffic getting to the airport, almost missed the helicopter. Wish I had. The way the pilot dropped through the cloud cover and hit the runway, he must have thought he was belly-landing an F-16.”

  An Army reservist talking into a cellular telephone waved Baruch’s beat-up two-door Honda through a roadblock. Baruch joked that the soldier was probably ordering pizza from Jerusalem but Elihu didn’t crack a smile. He was in a cranky mood, gnawing on the stem of his unlit pipe as if he were trying to bite it off. Glancing quickly at Elihu, Baruch took in the collar of his raincoat turned up against an imagined storm, the woolen scarf wound like a mask over his lower jaw, his eyes dark and anxious and fixed on a horizon beyond the one Baruch could see. Elihu’s black moods were part of the Elihu legend—the katsa always turned turtle when he was running an agent who might wind up with his throat slit from ear to ear if something went wrong. Concentrating on his driving, Baruch sped past a string of camels being led along the shoulder of the road by a Bedouin boy wearing earphones plugged into a yellow Walkman. Moments later they saw the sign that read “Sea level.” Rounding a curve, Baruch spotted the northern tip of the Dead Sea glistening far below them in the morning sun. “Am I’m right in thinking you’ve never met Sa’adat Arif before?” he asked Elihu.

  The katsa nodded. “I ran an agent once who dangled a numbered Swiss account in front of him. Sa’adat was representing PLO interests in France at the time. All he had to do was give us the odd scrap of information—who sat next to Arafat at supper when he was wined and dined at the Elysée, how the PLO doled out the frequent flyer miles it accumulated, that sort of fool’s gold. Sa’adat wasn’t biting.”

  Baruch snorted. “I’ve know Sa’adat for years—I interrogated him twice during the first intifada, I had lunch with him in Jericho last summer when he was named deputy chief of intelligence. He’s too shrewd to let anybody get a hook into him. He knows the ropes—you sell some fool’s gold, who can resist? at which point the buyer threatens to take out a full-page ad thanking you unless you deliver better grade ore.”

  “What’s he peddling today?” Elihu wanted to know.

  “Beats me. He asked for a meeting. He said he wanted to discuss the Apfulbaum kidnapping. He mentioned something about mutual interests being at stake. The key to Sa’adat is to know he never says what he thinks; you have to read between the lines.” Baruch remembered something else. “In case he asks what you do for a living, I told him one of the Shin Bet Arabists was coming along for the ride.”

  Two-thirds of the way down to the Dead Sea, Baruch veered off the main highway onto the narrow road that meandered through the Judean hills above the oasis of Jericho. He slowed down for a group of sweaty German tourists straggling back to their air-conditioned bus after hiking along the footpath to Saint George’s Monastery in Wadi Kelt, then plunged past abandoned Israeli trenches and rusting barbed wire into the lush back streets of the oldest city in the world. “Sa’adat asked me to come in the back door,” Baruch explained, “to avoid the Palestinian checkpoint at the main entrance.”

  “Why’s he keeping this meeting under wraps?” Elihu, suddenly suspicious, wanted to know.

  Baruch coughed up a laugh. “He doesn’t trust his own mother, so he’s not about to trust the PLO police manning the checkpoint at the front door.”

  Circling around through the wide shaded side streets to the southern end of Jericho, Baruch came to the Army base the Israelis had called Camp Hanan and the Palestinians had renamed Aksa when they took control of Jericho in 1994. Kicking up a cloud of dust, he drove down an unpaved road parallel to a high fence with razor wire strung along the top. Half way down the road they came to an open gate. A mustached man in civilian clothing, cradling a Kalashnikov, waited inside. “We go on foot from here,” Baruch announced. He locked the car and followed Elihu through the gate. The mustached man chained it closed behind them and led the visitors down a sandy path between two long barracks. He opened a side door and stepped back. Sa’adat, a round man with a shaved head in his early fifties, wearing a shiny synthetic Western suit and tie, was sitting behind a vast desk under an old British mandate poster that depicted a waterfall in a Dead Sea oasis and said “Visit Palestine.” When he saw the Israelis come through the door, he closed the file he was reading and added it to a pile of dossiers, and weighed them down with a loaded Russian revolver. “Baruch, my friend, I am cheerful to see you,” he said in English, rising to his feet. Coming around the desk to shake hands, he beamed a gold-toothed smile in Elihu’s direction. “You, sir, are unidentified to me, but it is my misfortune to be more or less identified with your employer, which arrested me more times than I count on the fingers of two hands.”

  Sa’adat snapped his fingers. Two aides pushed over easy chairs and offered the Israelis glasses of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. Sa’adat settled onto the back of the desk. Elihu, still in a foul mood, jammed the end of the dead pipe into his mouth. “We have never met before,” he ventured, “but you are known to me by reputation.” Sa’adat accepted this with a nod. “We hear stories,” Elihu continued, baiting the Arab, “about how you tie the hands of Palestinian prisoners behind their backs and string them up by the wrists until their shoulder sockets give way. We hear stories about how you lock Palestinians who criticize the Authority in tiny isolation cells for weeks on end and make them drink their own urine. It is said that four or five prisoners have died here in recent months.”

  The smile froze on Sa’adat’s face. “Everything we know,” he said softly, “we learned from you Isra’ilis. We are school children next to you. The hooks on the walls from which we hang prisoners by the wrists, the isolation cells were built by you when you occupied Jericho.”

  Elihu kept his eyes fixed on Sa’adat as he sipped his juice; he clearly didn’t like what he saw. Baruch cleared his throat. “Your fax said that you wanted to discuss the Apfulbaum kidnapping.”

  Baruch held his breath. It could have gone either way. Moving with great deliberation, Sa’adat circled the desk and sat down behind it. “I will not hold the Shin Bet against him,” he said, talking to Baruch but staring Elihu in the eye, “if he does not hold the Authority’s Preventive Security apparatus against me—we both work for organizations whi
ch believe ends justify means.”

  “Depends on the ends,” Elihu growled. “Depends on the means.”

  “Apfulbaum,” Baruch repeated, hoping to get the meeting back on track.

  “Apfulbaum,” Sa’adat agreed, and the gold-toothed smile reappeared on his face. “Your Prime Minister has publicly announced that he is willing to consider the principle of freeing prisoners in exchange for the release of the Rabbi Apfulbaum and his secretary. He has asked the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority to negotiate with the people who kidnapped the two Jews. The Chairman has been encouraged by Mr. Zachary Taylor Sawyer of the White House to put himself in your Prime Minister’s shoes. The Chairman understands that your Prime Minister is attempting to purchase time. The Chairman is willing, even eager, to be of assistance—he is against all manifestations of terrorism and for the peaceful settlement of the differences between us. Above all else he does not want to put in jeopardy the forthcoming meeting in Washington and the signing of the treaty of peace. The situation, however, is complicated by the fact that there is no one to negotiate with. And if you take the kidnappers at their word—I myself have looked many times at the film they sent you—there would appear to be nothing to negotiate about. Either you obtain the release of the people they ask for or they will kill the Jewish hostages.”

  Baruch said, “You have sources that we don’t have—you must have some leads on the Abu Bakr Brigade.”

  Sa’adat scratched at a pitted nostril. “The original Abu Bakr was a pious man, an early convert to Islam, the father-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as his close friend and first successor, what we call the khalifa and you call caliph. The fact that the kidnappers adopted this name suggests they are Muslim fundamentalists.”

  Elihu jammed the pipe back into his mouth. “We came a long way to hear what we already know,” he remarked.

  “Islamic fundamentalists,” Sa’adat went on, ignoring Elihu, addressing himself to Baruch, “are the common enemy of the Shin Bet and the Authority’s Preventive Security apparatus. Which is why the Isra’ilis gave us a free hand on the West Bank long before the Authority took formal control of its villages and towns. Which is why an occasional Palestinian is suspended above the ground from his wrists tied behind his back. The technique is not fool proof, but nine out of ten times we succeed in getting the information we seek. When we fail it is because the Palestinian suspended by his wrists does not have the information we seek, or suffers a fatal heart attack before he can recall it.”