Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  “I wish we could just cross at the Mandelbaum Gate,” I said. “Like everybody else.”

  “I wish you could, too,” she said, stroking my arm. “But you can’t. You’re not like everyone else. Other people have papers, at least a passport. You don’t.”

  “And we don’t want anybody looking at her too closely, I suppose.”

  “No, we don’t. Try to bring her through the gate, and somebody’s bound to realize she’s not from this earth. If not the Jordanians, then the Israelis. And then the interrogations will start. Believe me, it’ll be bad. The whole purpose will be defeated.”

  A priest, stocky, bearded, brown-robed, had led a group of tourists to a spot about twenty feet away. Some of them fingered rosaries and crucifixes as he read to them from the New Testament: “ ‘And immediately, while Peter yet spake, the cock crew. And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out and wept bitterly.’ ”

  “Do you really think they can save her?” I said, once the group had left.

  “I’m not sure. If she’s got a chance anywhere, it’s at the Hadassah Hospital on the other side. That’s the best medical facility in the area. Maybe in the world. All the doctors here know that, and their patients do too, although of course they don’t say it too loud.”

  She put her arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. “I wish I were going with you,” she said.

  “Remind me again why you can’t.”

  “If the Israelis catch you crossing, the worst is they’ll hold you a couple of weeks till they get confirmation you really are Danny Shapiro, a nice Jewish boy from Pennsylvania who wouldn’t do them any harm. They catch me, next thing I’m back in the States. Standing trial for murder.”

  I pressed my face into her hair. It smelled clean, of unscented soap. I’d never smelled anything finer in my life.

  “So once I go,” I said, “I’ll never see you again.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “Not at all. There’s an even chance she may live. Better than even, Dr. Talibi says, if she makes it into the right hands. And if she lives, in a few years this world is going to be so different from anything we’ve known, we’re not going to recognize it. So different we’ll think we’re living on another planet. Then I’ll be able to come home. And you and I will be together again.”

  The voice came out of the air: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

  Then it trailed away, and I could not hear any more.

  It’s the priest, I thought. The same priest who was here with the people a minute ago.

  The Valley of Hinnom began to darken. I looked toward the rocky, brambly slopes after which hell had been named. Once upon a time the people of Jerusalem had used this valley to burn their garbage, sometimes also their children, as sacrifices to pagan gods or maybe their own God. The stink of the place, the low growling flames, and the screams of children burned alive had made gei hinnom, “the Valley of Hinnom,” into Gehenna, the Jewish word for hell. I winced and turned the binoculars upon the limestone houses of Abu Tor.

  The barbed wire fence and the street the fence cut in two came into my view. Also a teenaged boy, walking down the street from the Israeli side toward the fence.

  I kept my binoculars focused on that boy. I noticed, as he walked, how his clothes hung on his body as though they weren’t quite right for him: suntan pants and a short-sleeved yellow shirt that seemed a little too large, a little too loose. He wore thick black horn-rimmed glasses.

  I knew that boy.

  I knew why his face sagged under the weight of sadness, of helpless worry, of exhaustion too deep to be slept away. I knew why he stepped so awkwardly, as though his body were a bicycle he hadn’t quite learned to ride.

  He’s sixteen years old, but he might be twelve, or sixty. He’s the son of a sick mother, of a father who’s been cheated in life and marriage. He struggled so hard to win his contest and fly this summer, far away; but when he got on the plane, his grief and loneliness and fear got on with him, and wherever he goes they will find him.

  —I can’t stand him, I hate him, I despise him; with those thick glasses he’s the ugliest creature in the world—

  He’s wanted a girlfriend but never had one. Close, close he came when wild, pretty Rosa reached out her hand to him, and who knows what would have happened if he’d said yes? But she’ll not marry a man who’s shy, for he’ll run away when she winks an eye; and he did, he did, he ran home to his mommy. Who now is dying anyway.

  He stopped at the fence. He stared at it, as if only now starting to grasp that this is the end of his world, that the border cuts through Abu Tor like a crevasse in the earth and there’s nowhere more for him to go. He read about this in his guidebook. But it doesn’t sink in until you actually stand there.

  Tonight he’ll write to Jeff back home, telling him about this place. He wants to convey with Abu Tor what he can’t say in so many words, how it is to feel your difference separating you, bounding you, hemming you in. He imagines that if Jeff can only understand this and accept it, they might be friends again—

  He opened his guidebook, to make sure this really was Abu Tor, that he hadn’t made some mistake. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and began writing, writing, while behind him two brown-skinned Israeli boys about his age, who a few minutes ago offered to buy the cheap box camera dangling from a cord around his neck, nudged each other and pointed toward him, and laughed.

  —because Jeff doesn’t care anymore about UFOs, and the book they were going to write will never get written. Jeff and his folksinging friends shout back and forth to one another in the hallways about the songs they’re learning, the gigs they’ll drive to this weekend. The mission, to search out the truth that lies beneath the shell of this existence—Jeff has abandoned it. So would this boy, if the choice were his.

  But it isn’t.

  He chose his path long ago. Now he’s become that path. If it leads to a dead end, to a border he can’t cross, he must follow.

  That’s why he’s so tired.

  For this one summer he’s had wings to fly. In a little over two weeks his summer will end. The people here aren’t what he expected; they’re warm and vital but coarse and rough, and everyone’s Jewish, but it turns out that wasn’t what his difference was about after all. Even here he feels the walls, the boundary, the pain of his oddness.

  And since he got here, he hasn’t had a letter from his mother. His father’s letters hint at bad things happening with her but won’t say what they are. Now he stands before a barbed wire fence, gazing into a place he can’t ever go—

  The boy looked up, straight at me.

  I lowered my binoculars. I looked away.

  CHAPTER 31

  SHE TOOK ME TO DINNER AT A RESTAURANT ON SALAH ED-DIN Street. The upper chamber was carpeted; cushions were spread around the low tables; we had until midnight. We sat on the cushions in the candlelight.

  I leaned against the wall as I ate. Rochelle leaned against me. We ate hummus with pita, and olives, and roast chicken served on pita. We drank bottled water and later tea. They served wine in that restaurant, but neither of us wanted any.

  “You must give my best to Julian when you see him,” she said. “I don’t know when that’ll be, or where you’ll be. But whenever it happens, tell him his old pal Rachel says hello.”

  How will he know that’s you? I wanted to ask. But she’d dipped a bit of pita into the hummus and touched it to my lips. I opened my mouth, and she fed it to me.

  “If he’s still alive,” I said when I finished swallowing.

  “Oh, he’
s alive. I don’t know where he is, but he’s alive. Julian’s not so easy to kill. They’ve tried, more than once.”

  They brought dessert.

  “She’s going to live,” Rochelle said.

  “I hope so,” I said. The dessert was sweet and heavy, something made with honey. I didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t expect ever to taste it again.

  “She’ll live,” Rochelle said. “And then she’ll grow. And when she’s grown, she’ll do what she was sent here for. Then you and I will be together again. And you know what we’re going to do then?”

  “What?” I said.

  “We’ll go to the old farmhouse, up to the second floor, and we’ll make love. Real love. On the floor, that thin old carpet. The way I wanted to, the night I met you.”

  Outside, Jameela met us. She put my baby into my arms. Each time I held her I was astonished how light she was. She weighed less than the blankets wrapped around her.

  Her eyes were wide open, as usual. She didn’t cry or wail; no sound, except that dreadful breathing. Jameela kissed her eyes and wept and went off into the darkness. “Ma’a-salaameh,” I called out, which is how you say good-bye in Arabic. But Jameela didn’t answer.

  We stood alone by the edge of the valley. The taxi’s taillights vanished in the distance. No moon; only the black sky, the gleaming stars.

  “Turn off the flashlight,” Rochelle said.

  The breeze, which had blown a faint odor of garbage from the valley, died down. The air was again still and sweet. I heard in the darkness the soft, familiar sound of her unbuttoning her blouse.

  “Don’t go yet,” she said.

  Perhaps I could begin to see her—perhaps I heard it, or somehow felt it—but I knew she was taking a chain off her neck.

  “Give me your hand.”

  I reached out, and she took my hand, held it tight, pressed the chain into it. I felt against my palm the six sharp points of a Star of David.

  “I’ve worn it underneath,” she said. “From the day I got here.”

  “Rochelle. Oh, Rochelle—”

  “You’ll give it back,” she said. “Next time we meet.”

  A rectangle of light glowed in the distance. A lighted window, somewhere in the Israeli section of Abu Tor. I took it as my beacon.

  I heard the land mine explode a hundred times over as I ran. A thousand times I felt it. I felt my limbs, torn from each other, hanging bloody on the spiny bushes of Hell Valley. I saw the child I’d been carrying, naked and helpless, gasping out her life on the flinty ground as the sun rose over the Jordanian hills.

  The light grew larger as I stumbled through rocks and brambles. At last I began to believe we were nearly there, nearly safe. When I heard the popping in my ears, I didn’t grasp that it was gunfire. It took me even longer to understand I was the one they were shooting at.

  I set my course toward that window.

  Who are you that you sit up in your room in the dead of night?

  Are you reading, perhaps, because you can’t sleep? In your bed, do images come of your mother tossing back and forth like you, insomniac, her heart struggling to pump its blood, her lungs straining to draw in the air? Do you dream now, awake? Do you write in your journal to comfort yourself, to keep yourself from the worse dreams that will come when you slide off into sleep?

  Whatever it is—please—stay at your desk.

  Don’t stop reading; don’t stop writing.

  Don’t go back to bed.

  Don’t turn off the light.

  PART SEVEN

  THE CRY

  (AUGUST 1966)

  CHAPTER 32

  “SHE’S GOT TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL,” I SAID LOUDLY. “DO you understand? We’ve got to take her to the hospital.”

  I held up my hands—maybe to gesture, maybe to reach out toward my child. The handcuffs rattled on my wrists. The soldier on my left forced them back down. He pushed me, not very roughly, to keep me walking. Somewhere ahead, a ceiling bulb shone dimly.

  “All right, all right, we take her,” said the soldier on my right, whose name was Shimon. “Now you shut your mouth, OK?”

  The soldier on the left burst out laughing. So he did understand English. The son of a bitch. When they first captured me, I’d babbled to him about how my child was terribly sick and needed to go to the hospital right away, and he just stared as if he had no idea what I was saying. Then he turned and spit on the ground.

  As for the third man, the tall, muscular sergeant whom the others called Yehoshua, he seemed not to know any English at all. He carried my baby, still wrapped in her blanket, as he strode ahead of us down the dark corridor. The walls echoed the sound of her breathing. I would have called out to him, but I knew it wasn’t any use. Again I tried Shimon. “Hos-pital,” I said. “You understand? Hos-pital. She must go right now. She’s sick. Very sick.”

  “You say that twenty times already,” said Shimon. “Thirty maybe.”

  “It’s important. It’s very important—”

  “Listen,” said Shimon, “I know what is hospital, OK? I been in hospital myself. You be in hospital yourself now if we didn’t find you. Dead maybe.”

  I knew what he meant. After they’d begun shooting, and I’d realized they were aiming at me, I had cried out: “Don’t shoot. I’m an American!” They stopped firing. They shone a searchlight on me and used it to guide me up out of the valley. “Now left!” they screamed. “Now right!” And on more than one occasion, when I tried to walk straight ahead: “No, no, no, no!”

  “You walk on mokaysh,” Shimon said to me. “Mokaysh go boom”—he illustrated the violence of the explosion by stopping still in the corridor and waving his arms in all directions—“you go into hospital all right.”

  The sergeant turned and roared something at us. He waved his arm impatiently. Shimon started walking again. The soldier on my left pushed me to walk faster.

  “You come out of hospital,” Shimon said, “you got no legs. No baytzeem either, maybe.”

  “No baytzeem?” I said. “No eggs?”

  That was the only meaning I had known for the Hebrew word until then.

  The soldier on my left whooped with laughter. Shimon laughed too.

  “Maybe he already doesn’t have any baytzeem,” the soldier on my left said to Shimon. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t understand.”

  “Your new home,” said Shimon. “You like it?”

  It was a tiny, dank cell, about eight by ten feet. It had no window. We’d gone down a flight of steps when we first entered the building, and we were clearly underground. A small bunk bed, without pillow or blanket, lay against one wall. In the corner opposite the bed stood a bucket, its mouth covered by a flat piece of wood.

  They took off my handcuffs. I stumbled to the cot and threw myself down; I was too exhausted to stand. They didn’t try to stop me.

  “You sleep good tonight,” said Shimon. “Tomorrow you got a full day. Lots of talking to do.”

  He stood by the cot, looming over me. The sergeant and the third soldier leaned against the wall opposite. My baby breathed noisily in the sergeant’s arms.

  “You tell us all kinds of things tomorrow,” Shimon said. “You tell us what the hell you doing in Jordan. Why you crossing the border in the middle of the night. Where you get that ... baby.”

  “I told you. I’m an American citizen—”

  “Then where your passport?”

  We’d had this exchange a dozen times before. “What about her?” Shimon said, gesturing toward the baby. “She an American citizen too?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “She an Arab, or a Jew, or what?”

  The sergeant groaned and shifted his feet. This didn’t seem to be a response to anything we had said, none of which he’d given any sign of understanding.

  “Maybe to know what she is,” said Shimon, “we need a—a—scientist.” He groped for the words. “A space scientist. Don’t you think?”

  “No, no,” I wailed. “She’s
just a sick child, is all. Horribly sick, and she needs—”

  But the door had already slammed shut.

  In the morning they were back. Shimon shook me to wake me up. There was no need. I hadn’t slept at all.

  “This baby,” Shimon said. “She doesn’t sleep. Isn’t that right?”

  “She’s sleeping now,” I said, pointing to her.

  “She doesn’t cry either. Not now, not before. I never saw a baby that doesn’t cry.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Have you ever heard her cry?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Tell me something.” He leaned close; I smelled the coffee on his breath. The baby’s eyelids trembled but did not open. “In the world she comes from, the babies don’t cry?”

  Outside, the sun had just cleared the horizon. The morning air was fresh and cool and soft. They led me to a small black car without official markings, into which I was invited, not pushed.

  “Where are you taking me?” I said.

  The sergeant drove. There was something familiar about the way he handled the wheel. I sat next to Shimon in the back seat, my baby against my shoulder. This time they hadn’t bothered to handcuff me.

  “Coming now to the corner of Yafo and Ben-Yehuda streets,” Shimon announced jovially, like a guide on a tourist bus. “Heart of downtown Jerusalem. Lots of falafel stands here. Sell very good falafel. You want we should jump out, buy you a falafel to eat?”

  I looked straight ahead. The third soldier, whose name I didn’t know, sat in the passenger seat next to the sergeant.

  “You hungry?” Shimon asked.