Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  The young woman clutched the newborn baby to her breast. “I know who you are,” she blurted to the Doctor. “That our first-born has been brought into this imperfect world by the mujaddid brings great honor to my husband, to my family, to my clan. I will call the boy Daoud, after my martyred cousin.”

  “Raise him to follow the straight path of the Messenger,” the Doctor whispered.

  “It will be so, I vow this.” She held the baby at arm’s length to look at it. “Do you think God sees the birth of this child?”

  The Doctor said, “The holy book tells us, ‘Not a leaf falls, but He knows it.’”

  Moved by the experience of delivering a baby—because of the problem with his eyes he had not performed a cesarean section since his internship years—the Doctor felt the need to give thanks to God before returning to the safe house above the maze of streets in the Christian Quarter. Tapping his bamboo cane on the cobbled pavement, he wandered through alleyways and narrow side streets he had known as a youngster to the Moslem Quarter and the long street known as Bab El-Silsileh, the Street of the Chain. The scent of spices and herbs and dried plants reached his nostrils as he made his way down Bab El-Silsileh to the great doors at the end of it that led onto the Haram-esh-Sharif, the mount where Solomon’s temple stood until the Babylonians destroyed it. Looking up, the Doctor could make out brilliant spears of sunlight ricocheting off the golden dome of the Qubbat es Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock. Removing his shoes, walking in his white silk stockings, he climbed the steps into the mosque and circled around on the worn oriental carpets to the other side of the massive boulder from which the Messenger Muhammad had leapt to heaven on his steed el-Burek. It was said that the horse had left the imprint of a hoof on the stone, but the Doctor, with his impaired vision, had never actually seen it.

  Prostrating himself on the carpet in front of the boulder, he pounded his bruised forehead against the floor as he recited a verse from the Qur’an. “Nearer to thee and nearer,” he intoned. He savored the dull ache in his head and marveled, once again, at the degree to which pain and pleasure, one the handmaiden of death, the other of life, were indistinguishable from each other. In his imagination, he could feel the massive weight of the boulder pressing on the surface of the planet; feel, too, the feather-weight of the baby in his hands as he plucked God’s creature from the uterus. What destiny awaited this child? Would he one day fill a knapsack with explosives and, like his martyred namesake, the woman’s cousin Daoud, blow himself to bits in order to kill Jews? Did the boy have a choice in the matter or was his fate preordained? Suddenly the Doctor was startled to hear a verse from the Qur’an in his ear; it was as if he were listening to the voice of God. Does man reckon he shall be left to roam at will? Was he not a sperm-drop spilled? The Doctor moaned and beat his forehead against the carpet again until he heard a ringing in his ears. The ringing gradually subsided, only to be replaced by another voice; where the first voice had been melodious, with a trace of an echo, this one was bilious and scratchy, and reminded the Doctor of one of those seventy-eight rpm records his father used to play on the family’s American Victrola. It hit me that I wasn’t praying, the voice rasped. I was actually talking to God! I beat my head against what was left of the retaining wall of the Second Temple until I had bruised my forehead. Oh, I tell you they had to pry my fingers loose from the stones, they had to drag me away.

  It was Isaac, of course, the Doctor’s Ibrahimic cousin whom he would sacrifice tomorrow night after the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast—unless God stopped his hand at the last instant the way He had stopped the hand of Ibrahim when he was about to sacrifice Isma’il. The Jews, as usual, had twisted the story; they believed that the patriarch Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice his second born, Isaac, on this very boulder when, as every Muslim knew, it was Ibrahim who had almost sacrificed his first born, Isma’il, at the Kaaba in Mecca. Shuddering, the Doctor climbed onto his knees and, with the help of his cane, pushed himself erect. He reached out in his near blindness and grazed the great cool boulder with the tips of the fingers of his left hand, the ones that guided him when he performed the cesarean section, the ones that searched out the telltale knob of bone behind the ear when he fired a .22-caliber bullet into the brain stem. It dawned on the Doctor, in a sudden flash of lucidity, that the two Ibrahimic tales did not really contradict each other; in subtle ways the two versions of the same story, recounted by cousins, complemented each other; breathed life into each other.

  The meaning of the story was not to be found in where it took place or who was to be sacrificed; it was that the Messenger Ibrahim was prepared to slay a beloved son with his own hand to demonstrate his perfect love of God.

  Could a sightless doctor do less and still claim to be the mujaddid?

  He had never before looked into the heart of the heart of the person he would sacrifice; never felt an affinity with his victim; never been confronted by someone who was so cocksure he was serving God’s will that he encouraged the person who would kill him to take his life.

  For heaven’s sake, and Islam’s, the Doctor would have to steel himself in order not to lose his nerve.

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  I taught at Harvard for fourteen years before coming to Washington. During all that time I never heard of a society called the Harvard Jewish Faculty Lunch Circle. Which is why I thought the invitation to be their guest speaker was someone’s idea of a joke. When they followed up the invitation with a telephone call from the professor emeritus who organized the lunches, I realized the Harvard Jewish Faculty Lunch Circle was not a figment of some prankster’s imagination. And in short order I found myself standing before a microphone waiting for a decidedly chilly round of applause to dissipate. I didn’t have to wait long. Everyone had stopped eating. Peering out at the faces that stared back at me with open hostility, I took this as a bad, even ominous, sign.

  Clearly, the members of the Harvard Jewish Faculty Lunch Circle didn’t appreciate an administration that leaned on Israel. Clearly, they didn’t think the signing of a peace treaty would lead to peace.

  I delivered my usual talk about how American Jews ought to think twice before criticizing the first American president to nudge the Israelis and the Palestinians into a permanent peace arrangement. This arrangement might not be one hundred percent to the liking of the Jewish lobby, I conceded, but it was the best deal Israel was going to get. I recounted how I once asked my 92-year-old father if he enjoyed life. “When you consider the alternatives,” he’d answered, “yes.” Before you disparage the Mt. Washington peace treaty, I told my audience, consider the alternatives. I was willing to concede that the peace plan was imperfect. But the alternatives to an imperfect peace, I suggested, were eternal hostility, chronic terrorism and occasional war. I reminded my audience of Abba Eban’s famous dictum about how the Arabs never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I invited them to search their memories, not to mention their souls, to see if this didn’t characterize Israeli attitudes also.

  They searched their memories and their souls and found nothing to support my thesis.

  With barely disguised relief I reached the end of my presentation and thanked the members of the Jewish Faculty Lunch Circle for hearing me out. Two younger faculty members at the back of the room started to applaud politely, then stopped when they realized nobody else was joining in.

  If looks could kill I would have had, at the very least, indigestion. The moderator called for questions. The first one came from my single ally in the audience, a former student of mine who had served a stint working for the National Security Advisor before returning to Harvard. Could I explain, he asked, knowing full well (because we had once discussed the matter) that I could, what had motivated Arafat to spurn the generous offer that Prime Minister Barak had put on the table during the 1999 Camp David negotiations.

  I could and I did; I had been thinking about this for some years and eventually planned to write an e
ssay on the subject. The secret to understanding Arafat, I began, was to realize that the Arab world has been waiting with baited breath for another Saladin, the twelfth century warrior who conquered Richard the Lion Hearted and his Christian army during the Third Crusade. In my view, Arafat saw himself as the reincarnation of Saladin, the paladin who not only expelled the infidels from Jerusalem and Arab lands, but would achieve this liberation through force of arms. The Christians of the first Crusade had conquered Jerusalem and drenched its holy places—the Temple Mount, the Mosque of Omar, even the Church of the Holy Sepulcher—in blood; before the battle was over some 40,000 Muslims—men, women and children—were said to have been slaughtered. Now Saladin, after decades of Arab humiliation, wanted revenge. So when the Crusader knights emerged from the walls of the surrounded city of Jerusalem to negotiate the terms of surrender, Saladin turned his back on the offer. Jerusalem was rightfully his, and he didn’t want it to appear that he’d won the city as a result of a negotiated treaty; he wanted to win it by force. Only then would Arab honor and Arab arms be cleansed of decades of humiliation imposed on them by infidels.

  Like Saladin, Arafat wanted what he considered to be rightfully his—in Arafat’s case, a Palestinian state on Palestinian land. But after years of humiliation at the hands of the Jews, he wanted to win it by force of arms. And so he used the first excuse that came to hand to launch the second Intifada. The rest, as they say, is history.

  The next question came from a brilliant young essayist whose anti-administration diatribes had filled the New York Times Op-Ed page since the peace treaty had been initialed. It turned out to be more of a tirade than a question. The administration’s tilt toward the Arabs, he argued, was driven by hand-me-down State Department prejudices inherited from the British when they were obliged to abandon Mandate Palestine. The Jewish state, surrounded by a sea of Muslims, was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for survival. The peace treaty we’d rammed down Israel’s throat obliged the Jews to live side by side with an Islamic people who, in their heart of hearts, wanted nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state. If things didn’t work out along the lines that the Special Assistant to the President for Middle Eastern Affairs expected, the Special Assistant to the President, currently on an extended leave of absence from Harvard, would sign his six-figure book contract and return to the relative safety of the university; the Jews in Israel, on the other hand, would have to fight for their lives.

  Long about then the moderator interrupted to remind the speaker that the ground rules required him to pose a question.

  “Sure, I’ll pose a question,” the young professor shot back. “Who had the bright idea of inviting this eristic apologist for Arab revanchism to speak at our lunch?”

  Though I doubted they knew what “eristic” meant, a number of professors nodded in agreement.

  The subsequent questions were only slightly less belligerent. Not surprisingly, this collection of faculty was starting to rub me the wrong way. I have a long-standing aversion to people who are more sure of themselves than I pretend to be; this is particularly true when it comes to discussing the Middle East. I’m sorry to report that the rough and ready side of my personality surfaced. I don’t really remember the next question; what I do remember is that I launched into a passionate defense of the administration’s Middle East approach which, I explained, my voice rising into the edgy octaves reserved for intellectual confrontations, was constructed on a self-evident premise, namely that the United States had promoted a peace process for years and nothing had come of it. So we became convinced that what we needed to promote was a plan, as opposed to a process. The advantage of proposing a plan and not a process is that it denied a veto to the handful of extremists on both sides who didn’t want peace; who could, until recently, undermine the process by keeping the caldron aboil with acts of violence.

  Contrary to what the members of the Harvard Jewish Faculty Lunch Circle might think, the plan in question didn’t simply surface on the President’s desk one fine morning; it was meticulously worked out in coordination with our allies in Europe and the moderate Arab states in the Gulf, and most especially with Saudi Arabia, which had demonstrated its moderation and its vision when it called, several years back, for a “just and equitable” solution to the Palestinian refugee problem (as opposed to the infamous “right of return”) as part of an overall peace package that included recognition of Israel by the Arab world.

  It must have been long about here that the Q and A session started to get out of hand. Tempers flared. Professors were shouting abuse from their tables. It wouldn’t have come as a surprise to me if someone had thrown an uneaten dessert in my direction. I may or may not have raised my voice as I batted away their insults. I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is getting in the last word before the microphone was turned off. “You ought to all go out into the real world and put your reputations on the line by influencing policy, and eventually history, instead of wrestling with the really big problems, such as whether James Joyce ever used a semicolon after 1919. Henry Kissinger once summed it up very well: The reason academic infighting is so bitter is that the stakes are so small.”

  Needless to say, I don’t expect to be offered grub by the Harvard Jewish Faculty Lunch Circle anytime soon.

  FORTY-TWO

  ABSALOM SLUMPED IN THE OTTOMAN THAT THE HOUSEKEEPER’S inventory listed as Victorian and Azazel, with his rabbinical mindset, described as antediluvian.

  The heavy lids on his eyes were shut tight but twitching, evidence of a dreadful dream or an inability to doze off while he waited for his sidekick to emerge from the dungeons with the residuum. Damn Azazel and his phobia about elevators—he was no doubt walking up the six flights and stopping on each landing to catch his breath, no matter that Absalom, not to mention the entire Israeli intelligence community, was anxiously (and sleeplessly) waiting to see the results of the search that had been based on the tip from the American Sawyer. Absalom had heard on the grapevine where Sawyer had unearthed the detail that the blind Redeemer with the mark of prostration on his forehead was a bona fide medical doctor. Sawyer’s “secret” trip to Paris had not gone unnoticed. Israeli Mosad operatives had been watching the Palestinian agents who were watching the woman Lamia Ghuri. Not that it mattered—one passionaria less wouldn’t seriously distress the Palestinian diaspora—but Absalom wondered how long she would remain among the living now that Sawyer had attracted attention to her.

  Wheezing, Azazel pushed through the fire door and shambled across the room to stand over Absalom. “How you can catnap at a time like this is beyond me,” he said breathlessly.

  Absalom permitted his lids to open lazily as he sat up. “Question of the purity of one’s heart,” he murmured. “And what pray tell have we here?” he demanded, blinking at the wad of brown index cards clutched in Azazel’s soft fist.

  “Five.”

  “Five?”

  “Correct. What we have here is five.”

  “Five what?”

  “Easy to see you’ve been getting forty winks. Wake up, Absalom. Focus. We have narrowed the list down to five, count them, five prime suspects who were all short, heavy, ardently Islamic medical doctors.”

  “You might have said so in the first place.”

  “I thought I did.”

  Absalom sniffed at the index cards. “Baruch, bless his copper’s soul, will be tickled fuchsia.”

  FORTY-THREE

  THE KATSA DIDN’T PUT MUCH STOCK IN BARUCH’S LEAP OF IMAG-ination. Even if you managed to swallow the notion of a doctor who was blind, to assume that a blind man could direct a terrorist cell and organize an elaborate kidnapping operation defied reason. Still, with Ramadan drawing to a close, Elihu was ready to clutch at straws. He picked up Dror in front of the Israeli “Pentagon” in Tel Aviv and made it to Baruch’s Jerusalem office in forty minutes flat. “His tires never touched the ground,” quipped Dror, who was dressed in faded Army fatigues with tarnished lieutenant
colonel bars and had an Uzi with a folding metal stock slung under his shoulder and several spare clips tucked into the pouch pockets on his legs. Baruch, slouched over a desk heaped with the dross from a dozen ordered-up meals, was leafing through a sheaf of sightings. Working from the Brothers Karamazov’s latest list, he had set in motion—with the katsa’s reluctant accord—surveillance of the targets: the one-eyed pharmacist in Jalazun; an Israeli Arab urologist with cataract-scarred eyes who had moved to Nazareth after serving out his sentence in one of Israel’s Negev prisons and now lectured in Nablus when the border was open and his son-in-law was available to drive him; a nearly blind American of Palestinian extraction who had retired after a career as an anaesthetist in a Chicago hospital, returning to live off his pension and American social security checks at his family home in Ramallah, not far from where he’d been denounced and arrested as a teenager; a Hebron-based general practitioner who had been released from an Israeli prison halfway through an eight year sentence after being diagnosed with retinal degeneration; a nearly blind doctor who had served twelve years in Israeli prisons for the attempted murder of a collaborator and now ran a free clinic in the Old City of Jerusalem; an extremely near-sighted American-trained Palestinian psychiatrist who had made use of his own time in Israeli prisons to publish a seminal study on the effects of incarceration on teenage Palestinians.