Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  “Thank you for that,” Apfulbaum said with great modesty. “For my part, I hope with all my heart that the Israeli government will refuse to negotiate and oblige Ishmael to excarnate me. Thanks to Ishmael, I have come to see myself as the modern incarnation of what our biblical Isaiah referred to as the Suffering Servant, someone who is fated to suffer for the sins of his people and thereby expiate these sins. If the Jews are destined to be a light unto the nations, I am destined to be a light unto the Jews. Dead, I will become a symbol for those who are against abandoning the land God promised to Abraham and his seed. My tomb will become a place of pilgrimage, a rallying point in the struggle against the Arabs. After my death—because of my death!—our Jewish settlements will continue to grow, the way the fingernails of a corpse grow after death.”

  “Fingernails do not grow after death, ya’ani. The skin recedes, giving the impression that fingernails grow.”

  “Oh. Still, you see what I mean?”

  “I do. I do.”

  “You’re both off your rockers,” Sweeney moaned.

  The Rabbi’s feet danced in their bonds. “They said I was off my rocker when I talked fourteen families into leaving Brooklyn and setting up shop in some derelict trailers on a craggy hill overlooking Hebron. For two years we had to shit in a portable toilet! They said I was off my rocker when I figured out we could grow lettuce in flower pots during the seventh sabbatical year when the land, according to the Torah, is supposed to lie fallow. I caused the lettuce to be sprayed with insecticides, which excarnated the worms—we sold the lettuce in the Jerusalem shouk for a fortune to religious Jews who didn’t want to run the risk of eating non-kosher meat. The windfall from this put Beit Avram on the map, financially speaking.”

  “Calm yourself, Isaac,” the Doctor pleaded. He reached for the Rabbi’s wrist and checked his pulse, which was racing. “I think we will cut this session short and give Isaac a rest. I do not like it when he gets too worked up.”

  “No, no, Ishmael, I’ll simmer down, I swear it.”

  The Doctor slipped the hood back over the Rabbi’s head. “Rest your eyes, ya’ani. Take a nap. We will come back in a while.” He shooed Sweeney out of the inner sanctum, but left the door ajar in case the Rabbi should call out to him. “He is quite a number, is he not?” he said. “Salt of the earth.”

  “Can I quote you?” Sweeney asked sarcastically.

  “Of course you can quote me.” The static-filled voices of Israeli soldiers reporting in from various corners of the West Bank burst over Petra’s radio. “For the sake of God, turn that down,” the Doctor barked at her. “Rabbi Apfulbaum is trying to sleep.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE DOCTOR LIFTED THE HOOD OFF OF THE RABBI’S HEAD AND shook him gently. “Are you up to another session, Isaac?” he asked. “I promise to keep it as brief as possible.”

  As Sweeney looked on, the Fiddler on the Roof stretched his manacled wrists over his head and yawned several times to clear out the cobwebs, then exercised his jaw, elongating it first to one side, then the other.

  “Why don’t you undo his feet and let him walk around the room?” Sweeney asked.

  “Kindly don’t lose sight of the fact that I am a prisoner,” the Rabbi answered for him. “At any instant the Israeli Army could come bursting through the door. For security reasons, it is essential that I remain tied to my chair.” He stood up in his bonds and hiked his trousers and arranged his testicles and settled down again. “We’re not children playing cops and robbers here,” he went on. “This is the real McCoy. Isn’t that correct, Ishmael?”

  “This is a death and life business,” the Doctor agreed soberly.

  “Death and life,” the Rabbi echoed, rolling his head from side to side to exercise his neck muscles. “In that order.”

  “You have not had an easy day, Isaac, but if you are not too fatigued, I would appreciate it if you would elaborate on the theme of the Jewish underground that we have been talking about. You told me during one recent session that you were its spiritual leader—”

  “And proud to be,” Apfulbaum interjected. “I interpret Torah for them. Even thou shalt not excarnate has exceptions.” He corkscrewed his body in his chair and spoke directly to the Doctor, who was standing with his back against the bricked-in window. “Each of us contributes what he can to the struggle.”

  Sweeney suddenly had the impression that he was interviewing two inmates of an insane asylum. “Are you saying your settlement of Beit Avram is the home of Keshet Yonatan, the Jewish underground movement?”

  The Rabbi managed an angelic smile. “So where else would they hang their hats?”

  “How many members of your settlement belong to Keshet Yonatan?”

  “Let’s see. Beit Avram has a population of three hundred souls. Of these, one hundred and eighty are adults. I define as an adult anyone who has reached the age of Bar Mitzvah. Of these hundred and eighty, one hundred and seventy-eight identify with the program of Keshet Yonatan, which can be summed up by the title of my small book, One Torah, One Land. The other two adults are laborers imported from Rumania and don’t speak Hebrew. Of the hundred and seventy-eight sympathizers, twenty-eight or thirty are in the trenches at any given moment.”

  “Tell him what you mean by in the trenches, ya’ani.”

  “Our front-line soldiers are divided into three squads,” Apfulbaum explained patiently. “One squad actively gathers intelligence on our Palestinian enemies in Judea and Samaria—where they live, who they live with, where they work, what routes they generally take when they go to work, what make of car they drive, that sort of thing. The second squad is in charge of weapons and explosives—providing the right equipment for the job. The third squad is the arrow in Keshet Yonathan, the bow of Jonathan. Its members are the ones who actually go out and do the dirty work.”

  “You want to spell out what you mean by dirty work?” Sweeney asked.

  The Doctor answered for the Rabbi. “All you have to do is take a look at the Jerusalem Post headlines over the past dozen years. There were letter bombs exploding in the hands of Palestinian mayors, there were attacks on important individuals, there were excarnations, there were raids on homes or schools to intimidate Palestinians.”

  Apfulbaum stifled a giggle with his fist. “Ha! We would set off bombs in trash bins at night in the middle of an Arab village, which invariably sent everyone within earshot diving under their beds.”

  Sweeney asked, “Did your dirty work accomplish anything?”

  “He has to be pulling my leg!” the Rabbi exclaimed. “You have to be pulling my leg. It demonstrated to the Palestinians that the Jews were in Judea and Samaria to stay, for one thing. And it pushed the more radical movements among the Palestinians to retaliate. They would retaliate, then we would retaliate for the retaliation. For every Jewish settler knifed while shopping in an Arab store, more money and more recruits would flow into Keshet Yonathan. And more Israelis would turn against the so-called peace movement that wants us to abandon holy land to the Arabs.”

  “What he is describing,” the Doctor said, “is a vicious circle.”

  “Not only a vicious circle,” the Rabbi said, “but a vicious vicious circle.”

  “You cannot have a vicious circle,” the Doctor pointed out, “if both sides do not hold up their end.”

  “As usual, Ishmael has disambiguated a complex situation,” the Rabbi declared vehemently. “I didn’t really see that part until he pointed it out to me. Long before our paths crossed, long before this affinity between us developed, we were collaborating. Now Ishmael and I are breaking new ground by articulating this complicity for the first time.”

  The Doctor came over and sat down facing Apfulbaum. “Let us move on. Do you know the identity of the leader of Keshet Yonathan, the famous—or should I say infamous?—Ya’ir?”

  Apfulbaum arched his neck; when he spoke, his Adam’s apple throbbed against the soft folds of skin on his throat. “Did Moses know the identity of the voice comin
g from the burning bush? Did Pharaoh know the identity of God’s anointed who led the Israelites out of Egypt?”

  “And who is he?”

  The Rabbi’s mouth shut with an audible click. His jaw trembled. He squirmed in the chair, but remained silent.

  The Doctor addressed Sweeney. “There are puzzles Isaac is not ready to solve. He removes his shoes and tip-toes to the edge of the Rubicon—but he will not wet his feet, he will not cross over. He is not yet sure enough of me—he is not sure what I will do with the information.”

  “It’s not that,” whined Apfulbaum. “Of course I know what you’ll do with the information. You’ll excarnate Ya’ir. You’ll discredit Keshet Yonathan in the eyes of the world. So what? That’s the least of it. There will be others ready to step into Ya’ir’s shoes and form a new underground movement.”

  Sweeney looked from one to the other. “Why won’t you tell him, then?”

  The Rabbi seemed to grow smaller in his chair. When he finally got around to answering Sweeney’s question, his voice sounded as if it came from a little boy. “Please, please understand—if I give Ishmael all my secrets, he won’t have any reason to come back every night and milk me.” A pained expression stole over Apfulbaum’s face. “You’re absolutely positive it’s heaven that Efrayim’s shipped out to? The reason I’m asking is that the clock is ticking, and with each tick we’re getting closer to the second deadline, the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast. With any luck, I’ll be shipping out next …”

  An eyelid twitched, a vein in his neck throbbed as he waited for the answer.

  THIRTY-SIX

  TWO TEENAGE BOYS, VETERANS OF THE intifada, ONE WITH HIS wrist in a cast covered with Islamic slogans, were rummaging on a mountain of rubbish at the edge of the sprawling Jabaliya refugee camp outside Gaza City before morning prayers when they spotted a black Reebok jutting from the trunk compartment of a burnt-out taxi. Coming closer, they saw that the sneaker was practically new and still attached to a human foot. They exchanged greedy glances as they pried open the warped door of the trunk. Inside, the rigid body of a religious Jew—he was wearing rumpled black trousers and a filthy white shirt, and still had the ritual fringed tzitzit protruding from under his black suit jacket—was folded into the small space. A leather hood covered the corpse’s head. One of the boys reached into the trunk and stuck his pinky through the small hole in the leather hood roughly behind where the dead man’s ear should have been. He jerked out his finger as if he had been burned and held it up for the other boy to see. His finger nail was covered with a sticky reddish-brown substance. Quickly, the boys unlaced the Reebok sneakers and worked them off the dead man’s feet. Scrambling over broken furniture and burnt tires, they raced off with their prize just as half a dozen Palestinian police cars, their sirens screaming, their lights flashing, came tearing down the unpaved road and screeched to a stop at the foot of the mountain of rubbish.

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  Where did we leave off? Ah, yes, my tête-à-tête with the Israeli Prime Minister.

  Five minutes into our conversation I was ready to believe something I recently read in the newspapers, namely that a homo sapiens only has twice as many genes as a fly or a worm. Nobody denies that the Prime Minister has good reason to be outraged; the murder of the Rabbi’s secretary, the discovery of his body on a heap of garbage in Gaza, would test the patience, not to mention the mettle, of any political leader. (Between you, me and the wall, I still wonder how much of his notorious anger is genuine and how much is put on, like theatrical makeup before the curtain rises, in order to give him greater freedom of action or, in this case, reaction.)

  “How many Jews must be murdered before you Americans decide that reprisals are justified?” he asked rhetorically. (I’ve come to realize, over the months I’ve been dealing with the Prime Minister, that most of his questions didn’t require answers; they only require listening to.) “On your advice, Zachary, I sat on my hands when we buried the four bodyguards. And now we will bury a Rabbinical student whose only crime was to serve as a secretary to Rabbi Apfulbaum. And in a few days we will surely bury the Rabbi. And you will come on the long distance telephone line—my God, your phone bill alone would probably pay our Mossad’s annual budget—and tell me the American President and the American people expect us to show restraint. Show restraint! You remind me of the diplomat who advised the Jews being shipped to Auschwitz not to do anything that might make the Germans angry.”

  I’ve noticed that conversations with Israelis almost always come back, at some point, to the Holocaust; you don’t understand anything about the Jews if you don’t grasp that, under stress, it is the psychological point of departure for their emotions. It’s no coincidence that every foreign visitor to Israel—here I am speaking from personal experience—is hauled off to visit Yad Vashem, their Holocaust museum, before they get to spend quality time with the political leaders. You put on a skull cap and stand with your eyes closed in the building where a voice is reading out the names, one by one, of the million and a half Jewish children who perished during the war. Sarah Goldstein, aged six, Vilnius, 1941. Israel Katz, aged four, Prague, 1944. They soften you up with guilt before they talk to you. And it always works. How can you be hard on a people who have suffered the way the Jews have?

  The answer is detachment: I can be hard on them when it’s necessary because I force myself to be detached—from their history, their fears, the plight, their problems.

  Not that I’d do things differently if I were in their shoes. Even when there is no shooting, the Israelis are at war: with the Arabs, with themselves. And all is fair in love and war. Everyone plays the cards that are dealt to them.

  Including me.

  Which is why I told the Prime Minister not to worry about our phone bill. Which is why I told him the retaliation he proposed wouldn’t be against the criminals who had abducted and murdered the secretary, but against innocent civilians. Which is why I added that arbitrarily killing a reasonable number of Palestinians wouldn’t save the life of the Rabbi. The only way to save the life of the Rabbi was to give in to the kidnapper’s demands or find the kidnappee before they killed him.

  I must have touched a nerve because the Prime Minister didn’t say anything for so long I thought I’d lost the secure connection. “Are you still there?” I finally asked.

  “Never,” he said.

  “Never, what?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea what he was talking about.

  “We will never give in to their demands. Even you don’t have enough leverage on Israel to make us do that.”

  “I wouldn’t make the mistake of asking you to do that.”

  The Prime Minister only grunted.

  “Which narrows the choices available to you down to one: find the Rabbi before they kill him.”

  “Believe me, we’re trying.”

  I’d reached the heart of the matter. “If you don’t find him, if they kill him, if his body turns up in a garbage dump the day before the Mt. Washington peace treaty is due to be signed—”

  I could hear the Prime Minister breathing heavily into the phone. “What does the President of the United States expect us to do?” he inquired, and I could detect, as I was meant to, the sarcasm in his voice.

  “Roll with the punch, Mr. Prime Minister. Take the heat. Fly to Washington. Sign the treaty. Shake the hand of Arafat’s successor the way Rabin shook the hand of Arafat. You can hesitate to show how reluctant you are, but then reach out and grasp his hand and shake it. And together we will try to get him and the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian police to bring this Abu Bakr to justice. Maybe you can save your people, not to mention the Palestinians, from another Intifada. And maybe, just maybe, you can find, amid all this religious clutter and territorial confusion, a small island of common ground. And on it you and the Palestinians can together construct an edifice of peace. On it you can make history—”

  “History,” the Prime
Minister shot back, “is fiction. Robespierre said that before the blade of the guillotine cut into his neck.” He cleared his throat in precisely the same way the Palestinian Authority Chairman cleared his throat and for an instant I lost track of whom I was talking to. Then the Prime Minister sighed and I could hear the pain in his voice—real pain, as opposed to staged anger—as he said, “Alright. We will stand down and stick our necks out once again.”

  “I owe you an apology,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For thinking you had only twice as many genes as a fly or a worm.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  IN THE APARTMENT ABOVE THE SEAFOOD RESTAURANT ON THE Jaffa shore, the katza, leaner and hungrier and crabbier than usual, haunted the communications alcove, hovering over the barefoot contessa as she pecked away with two fingers on the computer keyboard, deciphering the coded reports pouring in from Aza. Some two dozen Israeli technicians, armed with small black boxes crystal-tuned to a single ultra high frequency, were systematically crisscrossing the Strip in unmarked cars driven by Palestinian Authority detectives. At precisely eighteen minutes to and eighteen minutes past the hour, they listened—after which the reports began to filter in. Mobile units 17 through 20 in Khan Yunis, Aza’s second largest city, reported in first: no joy. Mobile units 21 through 24 in Rafa came through next: no joy. Mobile units 1 through 10 in Aza City: no joy. Mobile units 11 through 15 on the coast road: no joy.

  “What’s that?” Elihu demanded as the barefoot contessa typed out the random five-letter groups coming in from mobile unit 16. The deciphered message appeared on the screen: “C-o-n-t-a-c-t o-b-t-a-i-n-e-d” it read, “c-o-o-r-d-i-n-a-t-e-s a-l-e-f d-a-l-e-t.” The message broke off.

  Elihu, his nerves raw, snapped, “What’s going on?”

  “How would I know?” the barefoot contessa asked defensively.