by Paul Sussman
'One day this child will do great things,' her father had predicted, proudly cradling the newborn daughter he himself had just delivered. 'Her future and that of our people will be inextricably bound. One day every Palestinian will know the name Layla Hanan al-Madani.'
From the first she had loved her father. Loved him with a devotion that was almost painful in its intensity. While other memories of her earliest youth were fragmented and confused, blurred flashes of people and places and sounds, her feelings for her father retained a brilliant and undiminished clarity. She had loved her mother too, of course – her mass of unruly red hair, her laughing eyes, the way she would suddenly burst into song or dance, reducing the young Layla to fits of giggles. In her mother's case, however, it had been a gentle love, warm, simple, like spring sunshine, like a subtle caress. With her father, it had been something altogether fiercer and more elemental, a white-hot flame of affection, consuming and overwhelming her, the defining emotion of her existence beside which all other emotions paled into insignificance.
He had been such a good man, so handsome and patient and clever and strong. Always he would be there for her, always he would make her feel calm and secure. When Israeli tanks rumbled through the streets at night she would run to him and he would hold her, stroking the silken waves of her hair, humming an old Arab lullaby in his deep, slightly out-of-tune voice. When other children teased her because of her pale skin and green eyes, calling her mongrel and half-caste, he would take her on his knee and, wiping away her tears, explain that her classmates were only jealous because she was so pretty, so intelligent.
'You are the most beautiful girl in the world, my Layla. Never forget that. And I am the happiest man in the world, because you are my daughter.'
As she had grown, her feelings for him had only intensified. In her earliest years she had loved him simply because he was her father, an omnipresent figure who sang songs to her, read her stories and fashioned wonderful toys out of pieces of cloth and scrap wood. As time had passed, however, and her focus widened, she had come to appreciate him in a broader context, not just as a parent, but as a human being: a selfless, driven, courageous man who had devoted his life to helping others. She would visit him at his clinic – a single room with whitewashed walls and a bare concrete floor – sitting in the courtyard outside as one by one patients trooped in to see 'el-doktor', thinking to herself how special he was, how clever and magical to be able to make all these people well again. 'He's the best man in the world,' she had written in the personal diary she kept at that time, 'because he always helps other people, and he's never afraid, and he's good at making things. Also, he gave old Mrs Falouji medsins for free because she hasn't got any money, which was good.'
If her love had grown and deepened with age, each day seeming to bring some new aspect of her father to admire and respect, so too had her protectiveness towards him. With the intuitive emotional radar of childhood, she had sensed early on that despite his broad, white-toothed smile and the way he laughed and joked with her, he was an unhappy man, weighed down not merely with the pressures of his work, which left him drained, exhausted and prematurely greying, but with the hopelessness of occupation, the shaming impotence of watching his homeland being taken bit by bit from beneath his feet and being powerless to do anything about it.
'Your father is a proud man,' her mother once told her. 'It hurts him very deeply to see his people suffering like this. It makes him so sad.'
From the moment she had become aware of this pain she had made it her mission to help her father. As a child she had put on plays for him, done drawings, written stories in which handsome doctors saved beautiful princesses from wicked Israeli soldiers with M16 rifles (such was the nature of Palestinian childhood that she'd known what guns the Israelis carried before she could even place their country on a map). Later, as she entered her teens, she had begun helping him in his surgery, making tea, ushering patients in and out, running errands, even doing basic medical work.
'Why did you become a doctor?' she had asked him one day, as she and her parents were eating lunch together.
He had thought for a long moment.
'Because it was the best way I could see to serve my people,' he had replied eventually.
'But did you never want to fight the Israelis? To kill them?'
He had taken her hand.
'If the Israelis ever threatened those I love, then yes, I would fight. I would fight with every ounce of strength in my body and to the very last drop of my blood. But I do not believe violence is the way, Layla, however much I hate what the Israelis have done. I wish to save lives, not take them.'
It was the afternoon of her fifteenth birthday. Later that same night she had watched as the person she loved most in the world, the finest human being she had ever known, was dragged from his car and beaten to death with a baseball bat.
The lunch had, of course, been held at the Jerusalem Hotel.
Her friend Nuha was already there when Layla arrived, sitting at a table on the front terrace, her face buried in a copy of the Herald Tribune. A plump woman with heavily lacquered hair, slightly older than Layla, she wore a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and an overly tight T-shirt bearing the logo PALESTINIAN RIGHT OF RETURN: NO RETURN, NO PEACE. Layla came up behind her and, bending, kissed her on the cheek. Nuha looked round, squeezed Layla's arm and, waving her into a chair, handed her the paper.
'Have you seen this shit?'
She pointed to a story headlined US CONDEMNS PALESTINIAN WEAPONS SHIPMENT. Opposite was another story: CONGRESS APPROVES $1 BILLION ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL.
'The hypocrisy of these fucking people! It's like a bad joke. Beer?'
Layla nodded, and Nuha waved a hand at Sami the barman.
'So, how's it looking down there?' she asked, nodding towards the Old City.
Layla shrugged. 'Tense, like you'd expect. Har-Zion gave a press conference, all the usual crap about God and Abraham and how anyone who criticizes Israel is a Jew-hating anti-semite. He talks a good talk, you've got to hand it to him.'
'So did Hitler,' snorted Nuha, lighting a Marlboro. 'Are they going to evict them?'
'Sure,' grunted Layla. 'And Sharon's going to dance male lead with the Bolshoi. Of course they're not going to bloody evict them.'
There was a burst of laughter from another table where a group of Scandinavian-looking men and women – NGO workers, probably, or minor diplomats – were eating. Outside there was the rumble of an engine as an Israeli Izuzu trooper jeep motored slowly past, like some giant armour-plated reptile. Sami arrived with two glasses of Taybeh and a plate of olives.
'You hear about the bomb?' he asked, setting down the glasses and plate and lighting a candle in the middle of the table.
'Oh God,' sighed Nuha. 'Not another one. Where?'
'Haifa. It was just on the news.'
'Al-Mulatham?'
'Looks like it. Two killed.'
Layla shook her head. 'Between him and Har-Zion they're going to start World War Three.'
Nuha swept up her beer and took a long gulp.
'You know what I think,' she said, laying the glass down again and taking a puff on her cigarette. 'I think they're working together. Look at it: the more people al-Mulatham kills, the more support Har-Zion gets. The more support Har-Zion gets, the more excuse al-Mulatham has for killing. They help each other.'
'You know, you might just have something there,' said Layla with a laugh. 'Maybe I'll do an article.'
'Well, just remember where you heard it first, girl. I know what you journalists are like. The biggest scoop of your career and you'll claim all the credit yourself.'
Again Layla laughed. While the amusement registered in her lower face, however, her eyes seemed suddenly to have drifted elsewhere, into some other circle of thought. 'The biggest scoop of your career.' Where had she heard that phrase recently? It took her a couple of moments before she remembered it was in the letter she had received earlier that afternoon. How had it gone
? I've got information that could help al-Mulatham in his struggle against the Zionist oppressor, and should like to contact him. I believe you can help me. In return I would give you the biggest scoop of your career. Something like that. She'd dismissed it as a prank or a Shin Bet stunt, and it still struck her that this was the most likely explanation. Yet, now that a couple of hours had gone by . . .
'Do the initials GR mean anything to you?' Layla asked suddenly.
'Sorry?'
'GR. Do the initials mean anything to you?'
Her friend thought for a moment.
'Greg Rickman? The guy from Save the Children, the one who fancies you?'
Layla shook her head. 'He doesn't fancy me. And this is someone old, someone in the past.'
Nuha looked confused.
'Forget it,' said Layla after a moment, lifting her beer and taking a sip. 'It's nothing important. How's your day been?'
Her friend worked for an organization that monitored Israeli land confiscations around Jerusalem, and she needed no further prompting to launch into a long story about an elderly farmer whose olive grove had just been bulldozed by the IDF. Layla tried to listen, but her mind was elsewhere. The letter, al-Mulatham, her father, that last lunch they had had here at the Jerusalem Hotel. It had been such a happy afternoon, just her and her parents, all laughing together, talking, telling stories. And just a few hours later he was dead.
'Oh God, my daddy!' she had screamed, her hair slopping in his blood. 'Oh God, my poor daddy!'
And from that everything else had sprung.
JERUSALEM
They had a rabbi with them in the house, a thin, intense young man, American-born and raised, like so many militant settlers, with wisps of beard clinging to his chin and thick glasses that magnified his eyes so that they seemed to fill half his face. As night fell he gathered them all in the house's downstairs living room and began to preach to them, choosing as his parasha, or portion of text, Genesis chapter 17, verse 8: 'And I will give to you, and your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be your God.'
Har-Zion sat listening with the others, nodding and smiling as the rabbi assured them this was the Lord's true work they were engaged in here, a holy crusade that future generations would look back on with the same sense of pride and gratitude they themselves felt towards the great Jewish heroes of old. He loved to hear the Torah discussed like this, to feel himself a part of that rich tapestry that was the history of the Jewish people. As a boy, after his mother had died and his father descended into madness, he and his brother Benjamin had spent hours together at the government orphanage reliving all the old tales, dreaming that one day they too would visit the land of the Patriarchs, defend it against Israel's enemies, like Joshua and David and the great Judah Maccabee. The stories had, for them, been as immediate as their own surroundings, a separate reality within which they would immerse themselves to escape the cold and the hunger and the Jew-bashing that were their daily lot.
'The Torah and the Mishnah and the Talmud, these are what is real,' their father had once told them. 'Everything else is just an illusion.'
He had been a devout man, their abba. Too devout, in a sense, disappearing into his books of law when he should have been providing for his family. It had been left to their mother to keep things together, sewing through the night to bring in enough money to feed and clothe them all and put wood on the fire. But then his mother had died and, rather than rising to his responsibilities, their father had simply withdrawn even further into his studies, sitting for days on end reading and muttering to himself, occasionally breaking into wild, ecstatic cries of joy, telling them that he had seen a great menorah in the sky and that the day of redemption was near, until eventually they had taken him away and he and his brother had been consigned to a government home where the least mention of their Judaism would result in the most brutal thrashings.
Yes, thought Har-Zion, you could be too devout. He did not begrudge those who devoted their lives to the halakhah, the rabbis and the matmidim and the talmid hakhamim. In a way he envied them, their ability to withdraw from the physical world and exist solely in a landscape of faith and spirit. It was not for him, however. Frumm as he was, he was a man of action. That's why he and his brother had run away from the orphanage and come to Israel; that's why he had joined the army and fought the Arabs; that's why he was sitting here now. Because if his early experiences had taught him anything, it was that faith on its own was not enough. You had to do too; stand up and defend yourself in the real world. Cling to the Torah by all means. But always make sure that in the other hand you are holding an Uzi.
The rabbi finished his sermon and the group dispersed, the women into the kitchen to start preparing food, the men to guard the house, or to engage in private Talmud study. Har-Zion went up onto the roof where he took a couple of calls on his mobile, one from a donor in America to congratulate him on the occupation, another from a cabinet contact to tell him he was a fucking nuisance but that, provided there was no overt violence, the government would make no move to evict them.
'At times like this we need to stick together, Baruch,' the man told him. 'Although there's going to be a lot of international pressure, particularly from Europe and the UN.'
'Fuck them,' Har-Zion replied. 'They won't do anything. They never do. They're worms.'
He rang off and stood for a while gazing east towards Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University, watching as an Arab bus heaved itself slowly up the steep slope of Ben Adaya Road, smoke belching from its exhaust, then ducked back into the house, descended the stairs and went into one of the rooms on the second floor, switching on the light and closing the door behind him.
He and Avi would leave later that night, he decided, once things outside had calmed down a bit and they could slip out without too much trouble. That's how it worked with these actions: he'd be there at the start to organize things and secure maximum publicity; then, once the occupation was secure, he'd hand over to someone else, leaving them to direct the actual business of settlement, the stripping out of every hint of the building's former owners and its replacement with a new Jewish identity. There was other, more pressing business to attend to – interviews, meetings, his Knesset work, al-Mulatham.
He turned the key in the lock, crossed the room to check the window shutters were properly closed, then slowly, stiffly, started removing his clothes. There was a mirror on the wall opposite, cracked and murky, and, once he was naked, he took a couple of steps towards it, staring at his reflection. From the neck down the skin was a swirling patchwork of reds, browns and pinks, glassy-smooth and hairless, more like plastic than real skin. He ran his eyes up and down, a faint look of surprise on his face, as if even after thirteen years and a hundred skin grafts he still couldn't believe he looked like this.
Landmine, southern Lebanon. That's what had done it. A crude thing, makeshift. Half the time they didn't even go off. Their Humvee had run over it and erupted, swathing everyone inside in a searing cloak of flame. He would have died there and then had Avi, who was in a vehicle behind, not sprinted forward and dragged him from the flames.
'No chance,' the army doctors had said when they'd brought him in. 'He's dead.' But he hadn't died. He had survived, clinging to life with a ferocious determination, like a man dangling by his fingertips from the edge of a precipice. The pain had been unbelievable, weeks of it, months, a pain measured against which all other pain was exquisite pleasure, tearing him apart cell by cell, atom by atom, until there was nothing left of him but pain; he became pain, a creature formed from the purest and most intense primordial agony. Yet he'd held on, sustained by an adamantine conviction that God needed him to survive. And, also, by fury. Not for what had happened to him, although that was bad enough, but for his younger brother, his beloved Benjamin, who had been in the Humvee with him and had been incinerated by the blast. Dear, brave Benjamin.
He gazed into the mi
rror, at once repulsed and fascinated by the difference in texture between his head and face, which had by some miracle escaped the ravages of the fire, and the livid, glassy kaleidoscope of everything beneath. Then, with a grunt, he picked up a bottle of balm sitting on the table beside him, squeezed some into the palm of his hand and began rubbing it into the patchwork flesh of his arms and torso.
Five times a day he had to go through this ritual. The skin needs to be kept supple, the doctors had told him. Moist, pliant. Otherwise it would tighten around him like a straitjacket, ripping open with any sudden or expansive movement. That's why he had had to give up active service and take a desk job with Military Intelligence. Because there could be no break in this ritual; even to miss one session would cause him to literally tear apart at the seams.