But perhaps Dio was wrong. Whatever ‘wrong’ was.
Perhaps there were no shades of grey. Perhaps the natural state of the world – not simply Israel, but the world in its entirety – was chiaroscuro: the utterly black, contrasting utterly with the utterly white. Perhaps God was not on his side. Perhaps God found questions regarding grisly death and innocent children boring, and rolled His omniscient eyes at those with bleeding hearts who decried man’s inhumanity to man.
But Dio refused to believe that. He had lost his faith in the goodness of mankind, it was true, but refused to implicate God in mankind’s slow, self-made apocalypse.
God made the world, Dio believed: He created the functions by which all things formed and prospered...and, all too often, mankind took whatever had been given by Him, sowed it with blood and shit and depravity, and left it to moulder. Mankind, then, had the audacity to point their fingers at God; at ‘Human nature’; at natural selection; and, more commonly than any other thing, at one another. They were always so certain that the consequences of their folly, stupidity, and self-inflicted miseries were the fault of anyone – anything – but themselves.
What was God to do? Wash it clean and start over? Depending on what you believed, He’d already tried that approach once...and for what? So what was He to do? Bloody his hands, yet again, in an attempt to better those who refused to better themselves?
God was good. Dio believed that, with every beat of his – otherwise – tired and despairing heart. And in His goodness, Dio imagined, He must be desperately frustrated, and eternally lonely.
For a moment, Dio humoured the idea that, perhaps, Yvonne was with Him. It made him happy. He hadn’t been aware of it at the time, but Dio could now see that while he and Yvonne been together, he had never once felt lonely. He knew, though, that it was fanciful. That it was better the other way. Every person trod a different path, but in the end, they arrived – each and all – at the same destination. Perhaps, committed to Sheol – the place of forgetting – she would finally know some peace. Yvonne deserved that. More than anyone who had ever lived, he wished that for her.
But what of him? The typically philosophical bent of the Jewish conception of the afterlife had always pleased him. His understanding of the gentle, believable holism of Sheol was, for him, more elegant than the blunt-force-thrust of its later, Christian derivatives: Heaven for the ‘good’; Hell for the ‘bad’. He knew little about Islam...and didn’t like to comment on the things that he lacked an understanding of.
Sheol: a place, it was said, of forgetting. But a place – as his father had told him; as he believed – where punishment and reward were meted by the self, according to self-estimation. An eternity characterised by what manner of person a person knew him-or-herself to be.
The question remained: what did that mean for Dio?
He wasn’t sure he knew. In fact, he was sure that he didn’t know.
Not that he cared. He was done caring. That was the whole point.
§§§
“As-salamu alaykum.” Dio heard as he slowly, cautiously opened his eyes.
He realised he was lying on a soft, cool mattress – bare and ageing, but serviceable – in a small room with white-plastered walls and a rugged, pane-less window. There was a thin, woollen blanket tousled around the bottom of the bed; half on, half off the mattress. He realised he must have kicked it off in his sleep.
“Wa alaykum al-salaam...” Dio responded hesitantly, glancing upwards with a small, embarrassed nod. The boy had dark, sun-worked skin, and a broad, friendly smile exposing a healthy – close to flawless, in fact – set of sparkling, pearlescent teeth. He wore good clothes – well made and clean – but simple: a pair of bland brown pants, and a vest closed over an off-white, button-down shirt.
Dio knew a little Arabic; enough to get by...but, as with English, he knew – as he was, in fact, acutely aware – that stringing together more than a handful of syllables would expose his accent, and, thus, him.
“Is your father nearby?” Dio asked quietly in Arabic, trying to sit up, but slumping with a wretched groan as he realised that he was in a large amount of pain: his muscles burned with the slight exertion, and white-hot blades of agony stabbed through his joints. His face and neck burned like he’d been branded a thousand times...and his feet felt like hot coals had been sewn into them. The small boy regarded him with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, before nodding and running off. A short time later, a tall, broad-shouldered man – clearly his son’s father – meandered into the doorway, leaning against the left side of the doorframe. He had a pleasant, disarming smile, and glasses with thin wire frames.
“As-salamu alaykum, my friend.”
“Wa alaykum al-salaam.” Dio replied; with a little more confidence this time.
“You’re awake. That’s good. You slept for a long time.” The Palestinian man said, surprising Dio by speaking in perfect – though thickly accented – English. “You people,” he chuckled. The words sent a shiver down Dio’s spine. Those were words that were rarely followed by anything good. The man’s smile, though: something about it reassured him. Shaking his head, the man advanced on Dio’s prone form. “If walking aimlessly through the desert was an Olympic sport...”
“Well...you know. We’re a little conservative out west. We stick to what we know.” There was no point in pretending not to be what he was. His host already, clearly, knew. Dio coughed, his eyes crossing as air forced its way out of his lungs, grating through his throat like sandpaper.
“Are you a settler?” Dio shook his head, preferring the pain that scorched viciously around his neck and shoulder-blades to further irritating the dry, dusty interior of his parched throat. A look of relief washed over his new companion’s face. The man – as if reading Dio’s mind – reached behind him, pulling a flask from his belt. “I didn’t think so. Say of them what you will; the Zionists have more sense than this. Here: drink.” Dio grabbed for the flask, unstopping the top and holding it to his lips. He gulped greedily, his eyes flickering closed as the water washed down his throat and into his belly. His throat burned; the water scorching like Wright’s scotch...but his body screamed for it with a desperation he had never known. More than a little spilled over his cracked, chapped lips and down his neck, soaking into the top of his shirt.
“Hey, hey,” The other man grabbed the flask, yanking it away from him.
“Sorry, sorry...” Dio gasped.
“Don’t apologise, friend...” the Palestinian said, patting Dio’s shoulder reassuringly – and carefully – before sitting down on the edge of the bed. He re-stopped the flask and fixed it back onto his belt. “You can have all the water you like. But you’ve been in the sand for – what – days?” Dio nodded. “If you drink too fast, you’ll die. Wait an hour, and I’ll give you a little more.” Dio nodded his thanks. “My name is Salman.” Salman held out his hand. Weakly, Dio took it.
“Dio.”
“Which is short for...?”
“Nothing. My father thought that big names led to big egos.”
“A wise man.”
“He could be.” Dio nodded. “He had his moments. So...where are we?”
“Qabatiya.”
“Ahh.” With extreme care, and gritted teeth, Dio sat up: repositioning himself against the rickety headboard of the bed. “Could be worse, I suppose.” He vaguely registered that it seemed a vast distance from where his journey had begun.
“It almost was worse.” Sal informed him, reaching over to the stout platform beside the bed, and grabbing for a small, terracotta bowl filled with a slimy, greyish-white paste. He stirred the sediment at the top into the larger mass of it with his index finger. “When you went to sleep under that tree...tell me: did you know where you were?”
“I started walking after we passed Be’er Sheva. I saw a few towns on the way, but stayed clear. Beyond that...I’ve no idea.”
“Quite a journey, then.” Sal nodded. “I found you perhaps a kilometre outsid
e of Hebron. That was where you stopped to rest.”
“Fuck.” Dio muttered. He understood the implication. The idea of being found by the wrong people in the vicinity of Hebron was nothing short of chilling. The white room in Tel Aviv would have seemed like a training exercise compared to that.
Since the second Damascus Incident in twenty-twenty, the towns on the main road south from Jerusalem – Hebron being the largest and most strategically important of them – had been some of the most dangerous places to be Israeli in the entire Middle East. And that, Dio knew, was no small statement.
He remembered that it had all started with the news that there’d been a Sarin gas attack on a group of settlers in the Golan Heights. Zealots though the settlers certainly were – radical Zionists – they were under the protection of the State of Israel. They were still Israeli. The predictable response by the Israeli military – declaring open season on any-and-all pre-identified targets even remotely connected to Hezbollah – had been a bloody, decisive, and technically quite successful operation...but had involved a massive amount of civilian collateral.
Dio thought of Yvonne. He sighed a sad little sigh.
The Israeli counter-attack had edged covertly into Syria and Lebanon, and guaranteed that it would be a long time – decades, more than likely – before Hezbollah had the resources to threaten Israeli lives and interests again. But a fragile, unofficial armistice between the Israelis and Hamas had been shattered into a million pieces, and the latter group’s non-political wing was, at that time, at close to full strength.
Hamas’ retaliation began with a resumption of operations against the State of Israel from, in particular, Gaza and Hebron. Rocket attacks, kidnappings: the sorts of things that had become – sadly, and for longer than Dio cared to remember – business as usual in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Killing made more killing. The Israelis retaliated by crushing whatever Hamas leadership figures they could find; working their way down the list according to seniority and capability. Surgical strikes on arms caches and supposed ‘safe-houses’ followed. For a time, the two sides played the ‘virus versus immune system’ game, with attacks by Israeli forces growing more indiscriminate and frivolous as Hamas operatives ducked and weaved...fomenting, regrouping, and hitting back: always harder and with more sophistication and finesse than had previously been the case.
The new variable in this particular conflict was – thanks to the recent actuality of a formal Palestinian State – a massive evolution in the level of sophistication of the Intelligence and resources Hamas were capable of accessing. Directly encouraged by the Palestinian Government or no, Hamas’ had never been more effective...and their web of contacts and supporters had never been wealthier or more widespread. This allowed a semi-civilised veneer of ‘spy versus spy’ to overlay the grisly back-and-forth that was more familiar in conflicts between the two parties. The net result, of course, was anything but civilised: In fact, it shook Israel’s self-confidence to the core. The rockets flew truer; the targets moved faster; and the casualty tally was far less weighted in Israel’s favour than the Jewish State had come to expect.
But, in the end, it all boiled down to the depressingly familiar. New and improved though they – in some respects – appeared to be, Hamas’ strategy was still guerrilla where Israel’s was surgical. Rather than work from the top down, they worked from the bottom up. If opportunity arose, they moved on quality targets. The bulk of their resources, however, were dedicated to entry-level acts of terror. Violence against random Israelis – whether settlers, aid workers, businessmen, diplomats, or soldiers – became virtually inevitable in cities dominated by Hamas and its affiliates. Shadows of the Intifadas loomed up and over the cities of Israel. The timeless conflict bore on.
Now...Dio wanted to die. Or, more accurately, Dio believed that he deserved to die. But – as he imagined that any man of Faith would have – he wanted his death to satisfy two primary criterion: first, the manner of it needed to strike a certain balance of...symmetry. He wanted, essentially, for the punishment to fit the crime. Second, his executioner had to represent – or, ideally, be – a party who had a right to his blood. A party who, that is to say, had a stake in the debt he sought to pay. Consequently, he could think of nothing less appropriate than a self-righteous Muslim psychopath enacting symbolic vengeance on Israel by murdering him under a half-dead acacia tree on the outskirts of Hebron. Though...that said...he did see a certain kind of macabre poetry in the idea.
“What were you doing out there, anyway?” Salman asked. As Dio considered a possible response, Salman scooped up a small amount of the grey-white paste with two fingers, and, shuffling back on the mattress, began to slowly – with care and respect for the burst and broken blisters – anoint the soles of Dio’s feet. “It seems to me,” Salman continued conversationally. “That a Jew searching for death in Israel – ”
“ – Palestine, surely?” Dio quipped dryly, resulting in a wry smirk from Sal and a fingernail pushed into the semi-septic crater of a burst blister. Dio hissed in pain and recoiled.
“A Jew searching for death in the Holy Land – ” He looked to Dio with amusement, as if to ask: ‘now does this meet with your approval?’. Dio smiled. “ – Has a great many options. You chose, perhaps, the single most painful one available. Or am I missing something?” Dio shook his head. “You want to be punished, then? Punished by Allah?” Dio considered correcting him. He refrained...partially because it would have been rude, and partially because, when all was said and done...their respective spiritualities, however much they differed, oscillated around Faith in the same God. The futility of the schism – the stupidity of it all – almost brought tears to Dio’s eyes.
“I hurt people. I made bad decisions. I had faith in things that didn’t deserve my faith. I...” he paused, forcing his breathing to level out. “I killed someone who I loved very, very much.”
“And this is how you make your peace?” More a statement than a question.
“I’m trying to pay my debt.” More a self-justification than a clarification.
“Debt?”
“To God. For the things that I’ve done.” Salman laughed a quiet, knowing little laugh...giving Dio a strange, slightly patronising look.
“The stereotype you’re playing into doesn’t offend you, then?”
“Stereotype?”
“Debt. Payment. Jews and money?” Dio raised an eyebrow.
“Well I think that’s American Jews more than Jews like me. These days, at least.”
“So you’re just looking to...‘cash in’ on their idiom, then?”
“Stop it.” Dio chuckled despite himself – his eyes screwing themselves shut with the pain of it – his throat still scratchy and desiccated and raw.
“Allah isn’t an accountant. He doesn’t deal in checks and balances.” Salman shrugged. “If you feel you have a debt to Him – if you feel you must repay that debt – you mistake the relationship between Heaven and Earth. Look deep inside yourself, and you’ll see that the debt you must pay is to yourself, for the betrayal of principles that you have elected to live by. If you choose to cleanse yourself by doing His will, then it is not for Him that you act, but in acknowledgement that, through better knowing Him you may come to be a man more worthy – in his own estimation – of the love that Allah gives freely and to all. That He gives regardless of public action or private thought. Think on what He would want for you, regardless of your crimes, and know: that is the kind of man you must be in order to find the absolution that you seek. Take what you find, and act righteously in His name. Do not concern yourself with the day when your debt will be paid in full or it will never be...as it is, in reality, a debt to yourself, and one which will not be paid until you no longer view the penance you undertake as a burden upon you, but as a blessing that frees you. Take pleasure in knowing that, through Him, you need never to be aimless. Rejoice in the opportunity to do His...what’s the phrase? His ‘Good Works’.”
“Christian...Jew...” Salman smirked a provocative little smirk.
“Sunni...Shiite...” Dio countered.
“Sufi.” Salman’s smirk morphed into a wry smile.
“Should’ve known.” Dio sighed. “You sound like a monk.” Salman laughed quietly to himself at Dio’s observation.
“You can ignore what I’m telling you if that is where your heart guides you. You’re an Israeli, after all: self-righteousness is in your nature.”
“I don’t know whether to be offended or just agree, honestly...” Dio admitted.
“I should be clear,” Salman amended. “I do not mean it as, necessarily, a bad thing. After all...when a people has been wronged so often and so widely as yours, it is commendable...and entirely correct, that they should approve of themselves and their rightness. It speaks to resilience, and fortitude, and is a testament to the strength of their Faith. There is, perhaps, too fine a line between believing the self to be right, and dismissing all others as wrong, even to the point of tragic violence and cruelties.” Salman paused, apparently considering: “Though, again...surrounded by those who denied the very happening of my greatest tragedy, and, of course, my very right to exist – to be – in this world? I cannot be certain that my own reaction would not be similarly wrathful.”
“I – ” Dio attempted to respond, but began to cough vigorously, sending vicious shockwaves of sharp pain through his lungs and chest. He forced back the reflexive instinct to curl up and cry. Thanks to Salman’s ointment, his feet were numb and humming with dull, anaesthetised warmth. But throughout the rest of his body, the pain was, if anything, getting worse.
“Would you like me to leave you to rest?” Salman offered. Dio shook his head.
“I’ve had enough rest...and I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.” he clarified. Salman nodded. For a moment, they sat in silence. Dio was grateful when Salman started to speak. The distraction kept the worst of the pain at bay.
Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Page 26