by Kate Raphael
“Could we go to the beach?” she asked Maya.
“Oh, of course,” Maya said. “I should have thought of that.” When they reached Hadera junction, instead of turning south on Highway 4, she continued to the coast road, Highway 2, and Rania read the signs, in English, Arabic and Hebrew, for Zebulun Beach, Olga Beach, Beit Yanai, Ets Or, Netanya. Most of them she had never heard of, but Netanya was the beach city outside of Tulkarem, where she had been many times before the closure came in the nineties. Ets Or sounded familiar, but she couldn’t think why. It nagged at her as they sped closer.
Just before they passed it, it dawned on her. “Turn here,” she said to Maya.
Maya started to object, but seeing that Rania was on the verge of grabbing the steering wheel, she jerked it to the right.
“I need to do something,” Rania told her.
Kibbutz Ets Or was a small enclave of maybe one hundred fifty families. They passed fields of corn and broccoli, orange groves and greenhouses, just like the ones that had thrived in Tulkarem before the Wall came and separated so many of the people from their land. At a small grocery, the shopkeeper gave Maya directions to the Shabtai home.
Luckily, Yuri Shabtai’s mother did not work. Even luckier, she was not skeptical about an American journalist and her Israeli translator showing up to ask questions about her son’s death two years ago. She was an attractive woman in her early forties, with brown skin and golden hair. She ushered them into a pleasant living room, shaded by a huge fig tree. She even served them coffee with biscuits and figs from the tree.
“I’m very sorry about your son,” Rania began. Maya dutifully translated for Mrs. Shabtai, who told them to call her Miri.
“Thank you,” Miri said.
“Were you surprised when he… took his life?”
Miri seemed to give the question a lot of thought. “Surprised, yes, of course,” she said. “If I had thought my son would kill himself, I would not have let him go back to the army.”
“Did he think about not going back?”
“Yes. He planned to testify to the Knesset, and he said after that, he would not be able to go back to the army. He asked his father and me if that would be a problem for us, and we told him he should do what he needed to do.”
“But he did go back after he testified,” Rania said.
Miri shook her head vehemently. “Not that time. There was going to be another hearing, right about the time that Yuri… died.”
“But there was not,” Rania said. “Did they cancel it because of his death?”
“I don’t know,” Miri said. “You would need to ask Mr. Kalman.”
“Who is Mr. Kalman?”
“The man from the Knesset. Gil Kalman.”
Miri had nothing more to tell them. They finished their coffee, thanked her for her time, and accepted a bag of figs each to take home.
Chapter 38
Rania’s phone call yanked Chloe out of a fast-moving funk. She had returned to Azzawiya without Tina, who had to teach in Ramallah the next day. When Rania told her what Fareed had said, Chloe knew what she needed to do. She took the bus into Elkana, and waited behind the house for Malkah to come home from school. Malkah’s face lit up when she saw her, but instantly clouded over.
“I am forbidden to talk to you,” she said. “You must go before someone sees us and tells my father.”
“Where can we meet? I have to ask you something,” Chloe insisted.
“I need to tell you something, too,” Malkah said. “Meet me on Wednesday, in Tel Aviv. I can meet you instead of going to my skating lesson.”
“Won’t your dad find out if you miss your lesson?”
“I’ll call my teacher and say I am sick.”
“Where can we meet?”
“Anywhere not near the Kirya.”
* * *
They met at a small café Avi had recommended on Sderot Yerushalayim in Jaffa. Chloe bought them coffee and they sat down. Chloe was practically jumping out of her skin to know what Malkah had to tell her, but she knew she needed to let the girl spill it at her own tempo.
“How long have you been ice skating?” she asked.
“Since I was ten,” Malkah said proudly.
“Are you good?” Chloe bit her tongue too late. Why had she asked that? She didn’t want Malkah to think she cared if she was a good skater.
“Not really,” Malkah said. “I can do a single axel.”
“But that’s the hardest jump,” Chloe exclaimed. “I’m impressed.”
Malkah looked pleased at the praise, and her body relaxed a little. She put a cellphone down on the table while she sipped her coffee.
“That’s the same phone I have,” Chloe said, placing hers on the table next to Malkah’s.
“My father’s,” Malkah explained. “He gives it to me when I come to Tel Aviv, in case something happens and I need to call him.”
“I’m sorry you got into trouble because of the pamphlets I brought you,” Chloe said.
“Bseder.” It’s okay, Malkah said. “The girls in my class whisper about me, but they never liked me anyway. Some girls I did not know before talk to me now. They think it’s funny, what I said to the principal.”
“So you have some new friends?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t know if I want them for friends. They are kind of bad kids,” Malkah commented.
“Sometimes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t what you think they are,” Chloe said. She had an uneasy feeling, like someone was watching her. She glanced around the coffee shop. There were only a few patrons, and the young man behind the counter, who was flirting with a pretty young woman. She didn’t see anyone suspicious. She was nervous, though, and didn’t want to make any more small talk.
“Malkah,” she said, “Nadya took something from your dad, didn’t she? Something that could have gotten him into trouble?”
Malkah’s eyes widened, and she nodded slowly. “I came from school and she was in the office,” the girl said. “She told me she was looking for her passport and she didn’t find it. Instead, she found this envelope inside a book of Talmud,” Malkah said.
“Then what happened?” Chloe prompted.
“Nadya looked in the envelope, and there was a letter. She could not read Hebrew. She asked me to tell her what it said.”
Chloe waited. Malkah’s speech was getting more forced, the English words not coming as easily as when they had talked about skating and school. She was breathing a little hard.
“And did you read the letter?” Chloe asked.
Another nod, this one even fainter. Chloe was afraid to breathe, lest she say or do something to send Malkah flying out of the café. She drank her coffee and reminded herself patience was a virtue.
Suddenly Malkah jumped up, her hands covering her mouth. Chloe was sitting with her back to the door. She twisted in her chair just in time to see Nir Gelenter point her out to a guy with a snake tattoo crawling out of a short-sleeved white shirt. There were two other men with them, in identical white shirts and dark slacks. Malkah was crying as they bundled Chloe outside, pinching her hands together behind her back.
“How did you find me?” Chloe heard her ask.
“I thought I could trust you,” was her father’s reply.
* * *
Every Palestinian office had a book called the PASSIA Journal. It was published by an organization in Jerusalem, and contained addresses and telephone numbers for all the governmental and nongovernmental agencies in the Occupied Territories. It also had numbers for some Israeli officials, and one of them was Gil Kalman, Member of Knesset. Rania dialed the number.
“Mr. Kalman is not available,” said the curt woman who answered the phone.
“I need to speak with him,” Rania said in Hebrew. “I am from the police.” She prayed, don’t ask me which police. The woman didn’t. She put Rania on hold, and a loud Hebrew radio station played in her ear for a few minutes. Then a man’s voice said, “Ken?”
There was no
point pretending to be an Israeli; her Hebrew wasn’t good enough. She had better hope the fact that he was listed in PASSIA meant he was sympathetic to Palestinians. She explained in English what she wanted to know.
“Ah, yes,” he said, and she said a quick silent thanks to Allah. “Yuri came to me and said that he wanted to change his testimony. I started reinterviewing witnesses and found that there was enough doubt for new hearings. But before we could schedule them, all the Palestinian witnesses pulled out.”
“What do you mean, pulled out?”
“They all refused to testify.”
“At the same time?”
“More or less.”
“Was one of them a young man named Mohammed Omar?” she asked.
“Yes, he and his mother.”
“One more question,” she said. “When was this?”
“Just before Yuri died,” he said. Funny, she thought, how everyone said “died” rather than “killed himself.” Perhaps in Israel “suicide” was reserved for Palestinian bombers. But his answer confirmed her suspicions. The Palestinians who planned to testify had been paid for their silence just before the young Israeli had killed himself. It all fit together, but what did it have to do with Nadya?
Maybe Chloe had gotten information from Malkah which would supply the missing piece. She tried the American’s number, but only got her voice-mail. It was hours before the return call came.
“Chloe, what happened?” she said as soon as she punched the talk button.
“Hello? Who is this?” someone whispered.
“Chloe? I can’t hear you. Where are you?”
“I’m not Chloe—the police took her.”
“Police? What police? Who is this, please?”
“I’m Malkah.”
“Malkah?” Rania was baffled. What was Malkah doing with Chloe’s phone, and what did she mean about police? “It’s me, Rania, the Palestinian policewoman who came to your house. Where are you?”
“In the bathroom,” came the whispered reply.
“If you are in the bathroom, why do you have to whisper?”
“If my father hears me, he will take the phone.”
“How did you get Chloe’s mobile?” Rania asked.
“I put my father’s telephone on the table. Hers looks just the same. When the police came for her, she took my father’s phone instead of hers.” Good move on Chloe’s part, Rania thought, but it would be a problem when Malkah’s father asked her for the phone. She told Malkah to say she left the phone on the bus, and reminded her to turn off the ringer.
“You will help her, yes?” Malkah asked. “My father says he will make them send her back to America. I do not want her to be in trouble because she talked to me.”
“It isn’t your fault,” Rania told her. “If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine. I will not let them send her away.” She hoped she could deliver on that promise.
Chapter 39
Chloe was in a dark concrete cell. She thought she had been there for hours, though she couldn’t be sure, since every minute seemed eternal. From a distant hallway, she periodically heard thuds and screaming. She still had all her things with her, including, thankfully, a book, Scheherazade Goes West by Fatema Mernissi. She would like to call someone but she didn’t know anyone’s phone number; she always relied on the ones in her phone. Hopefully Malkah would figure out how to get a message to someone, and they would call her, if she could manage to hold onto Gelenter’s phone. She had to figure out somewhere to hide it before anyone came to search her. She tried tucking it into her underwear. Besides the discomfort, and the likelihood that it would come plopping out when she least expected it to, she thought she would look like she was packing a major dildo.
“Not really my style,” she said to herself, turning again to contemplate the scarce contents of her backpack. Crumpled up pamphlets, a few aged raisins, a bandana, a sanitary napkin—got it! If only… Yes, there it was, a seldom-used lipstick. She made a few red marks on the sanitary napkin, pried open the cotton layers, tucked the phone between them, and then shoved the whole thing into place between her legs. Now she was ready. If anyone asked why she had a charger and no phone, she would just say she had forgotten the phone at home.
Soon a woman cop came and ushered her into another slightly larger dark concrete room, containing a table and two chairs. The cop dumped everything out of the backpack onto the table, inspected it cursorily, set aside everything with Arabic writing on it and put the rest back, including the charger, which she had not even touched.
“Get undressed,” she said. Chloe removed her shirt and jeans and then stood facing her in bra and underpants.
“Take off everything,” the policewoman ordered.
“This is enough,” Chloe said. The woman seemed like she couldn’t quite decide what to do. She hadn’t even glanced at the clothes she had taken off, so it certainly didn’t seem like she was too worried about what she might have hidden in or on them. She was more interested in humiliating her, Chloe decided. Well, she was pretty humiliated standing here in her underwear.
“Wait here,” the woman said.
She went out and came back a minute later with the snake tattooed guy. His nonchalance suggested he talked to middle-aged women in their underwear every day.
“Why you will not take off your clothes?” he asked in heavily accented English.
“I did take off my clothes,” she said, indicating the pile sitting on the table.
“Why you not take off the rest?”
“I don’t like people looking at me naked—unless I know them really well.”
To her surprise, he nodded and told the woman “Zeh bseder.” That’s fine. He left and the woman told her to get dressed. Then she opened the door and Snake Tattoo returned. He fingered the Arabic brochures the woman had taken from Chloe’s backpack and the scrap of bag from a bakery in East Jerusalem. Then he sat down and let out a big sigh.
“Chloe, Chloe, Chloe,” he said, as if she were a malfeasant grade schooler. “What am I going to do with you?”
She hoped that was a rhetorical question.
“How do you know Nir Gelenter?” he asked.
“I don’t. I met him once at his office.” That, she figured, was safe enough to say. He knew she had been there; he had tried to arrest her there.
“Why did you lure his daughter to that café?”
“Lure her?”
“Why did you get her to meet you there?”
“I didn’t. I just ran into her.”
She was prepared for many more questions, but they didn’t come. The man made one call after another, some on a land line and some on his mobile. At times he was talking on both of them at once. Many hours later, three policemen led her into a waiting van.
It was nearly two a.m. when she saw the big metal sign proclaiming that they had reached the city of Hadera, halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. She knew there was a prison there with a special section for deportees. At least she would get to sleep now, she thought. Not yet. None of the police knew how to find the prison. They drove up and back, around and down. They made calls on their mobile phones and got very agitated. Of course they would not stop to ask anyone. Forty-five minutes passed before they turned into a massive complex with bars and curls of razor wire all around. She had never been so glad to see the inside of a prison.
A policewoman showed her into a little sitting room, where four or five women were watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in Russian. Apparently this prison had no lights-out policy. Next to the window she saw a few open bags of white bread and bricks of margarine, with little packets of jelly and tea bags. She was very hungry. She had not eaten since she left Azzawiya. The policewoman was impatiently indicating for her to continue into an inner room, where she found three sets of bunk beds. She had to climb up onto the top one and arrange the scant bedding she found there, trying not to waken the woman snoring beneath her or the three who occupied other bunks.
She lay still, wond
ering what would happen. She couldn’t do anything to help herself right now. She would get some sleep, and in the morning presumably she would get to eat, and then she would figure something out. She turned onto her side and let Tina’s face creep into her mind’s eye. Would she ever get to see her again, or would this be the last stop before she ended up on a plane?
The door to the little room opened and a small figure crept over to where she lay.
“At yeshenah?” the woman asked.
“Hmm? No, I’m not sleeping.”
“You are hungry.”
The woman thrust a margarine and jelly sandwich into her hand and set a cup of tea on the ledge next to Chloe’s head. She was gone before Chloe could thank her. Chloe ate and drank and let sleep overtake her.
* * *
“Boker tov, banot!” Good morning, girls! The false cheer of prison guards was the same in every language. Chloe had been in jail several times after protests in the States, and it was always the same. They woke you up at the crack of dawn and you had all day to do nothing. She didn’t imagine there would be any work shifts in this jail.
She was right. After the morning count, one woman mopped the floors with a squeegee, which took only a few minutes in a space so small, and then most people went back to sleep until almost lunch time.
After some initial inquiries about where she was from and why she was here, her roommates showed no interest in her. She managed to ask in Hebrew where they were from, how long they had been here, and whether they wanted to go home. They answered with a few words, and went back to watching television and talking on their mobile phones.
Only the dainty girl who had brought her supper the night before was friendly. She had big chocolate fondue eyes and her face exploded in dimples when she smiled, which was often. Her name was Ursula, she was from Uzbekistan, and she had appointed herself Chloe’s protector. That morning, as the women crowded around the breakfast table, grabbing cartons of cottage cheese and slices of bread, Ursula plowed into the throng and emerged, thrusting a plate containing two hard-boiled eggs and two slices of bread into Chloe’s hands. She had fought so hard for them that Chloe couldn’t tell her she didn’t like eggs.