The Attack

by Yasmina Khadra

  I hasten to light a cigarette.

  After a long silence, I say, “I don’t get any amusement out of worrying you, Kim. I’ve lost my taste for joking. Ever since I read that damned letter, all I can think about is the sign I wasn’t able to decipher at the time, the sign that remains a mystery today. There must have been a moment, there must have been a sign, and I want to remember it, don’t you understand? I have to remember it. I have no other choice. Since I got that letter, I’ve been constantly rooting around in my memories, trying to find the right one. Whether I’m asleep or I’m awake, that’s all I think about. I’ve passed everything in review, from the most unforgettable moments to the least fathomable words and the vaguest gestures; nothing. And this blank spot is driving me crazy. You can’t imagine how much it tortures me, Kim. I can’t go on like this, pursuing it and suffering it at the same time.”

  Kim doesn’t know what to do with her little hands. She says, “Maybe Sihem didn’t feel any need to give you a sign.”

  “That’s impossible. She loved me. She couldn’t ignore me to the point of not communicating anything to me.”

  “It wasn’t up to her. She wasn’t the same woman anymore, Amin. She wasn’t allowed to make a mistake. Letting you in on her secret would have offended the gods and compromised her commitment. It’s exactly like being in a religious sect. Nothing can filter out. The safety of the brotherhood rests on that imperative.”

  “Yes, but it was a question of death, Kim. Sihem had to die. She was aware of what that would signify both for her and for me. She was too dignified to pull the wool over my eyes like some kind of hypocrite. She gave me a sign; there’s no doubt about it.”

  “Would that have changed anything?”

  “Who knows?”

  I take several drags on my cigarette, as though trying to stop it from going out. A knot forms in my throat, and a few words escape me: “I’m so unhappy, I can’t believe it.”

  Kim sways, but she holds on.

  I stub out the end of the cigarette in the ashtray.

  “My father used to tell me, ‘Keep your sorrows to yourself. They’re all you have when you’ve lost everything else.’ ”

  “Amin, please.”

  I ignore her and go on: “When a man’s still in shock—and what a shock!—he’s not likely to know exactly when his period of mourning ends and his life as a widower begins, but there are some boundaries he has to get past if he wants to go forward. Where are they? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I have to move on. I can’t just stay here feeling sorry for myself.”

  In my turn, and to my great amazement, I seize her hands and cover them with mine. It feels as though I have two crippled sparrows in the hollows of my palms. My grip is so cautious that Kim’s shoulders tense up; her eyes shine with self-conscious tears, which she tries to hide behind a smile the likes of which I have never seen before.

  “I’ll be very careful,” I promise her. “I have no intention of taking revenge or dismantling the network. I just want to understand why the love of my life excluded me from hers, why the woman I was crazy about was more receptive to other men’s sermons than she was to my poems.”

  A tear spills out of my guardian angel’s eye and suddenly rolls down over her cheekbone. Surprised and embarrassed, Kim moves to wipe it away, but I’m quicker than she is, and my finger gathers the tear the moment it reaches the corner of her mouth.

  “You’re a wonderful person, Kim.”

  “I know,” she says, and then, halfway through a sob, she bursts out laughing.

  I take her hands again and squeeze them very hard. “I don’t have to tell you that I wouldn’t have made it through this without you.”

  “Not tonight, Amin. . . . Maybe another time.”

  Her lips tremble in their sad smile. Her eyes lock onto mine in an effort to get rid of the emotion that’s clouding them. I return her gaze intensely, without noticing that I’m twisting her fingers.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  9.

  * * *

  As a trade-off for allowing me to take such flagrant risks, Kim insisted on driving me to Bethlehem. She said she wanted to be at my side. If only to serve as my chauffeur, she added. My wrist isn’t completely recovered yet, and it’s still hard for me to lift a bag or hold on to a steering wheel.

  I tried to dissuade her, but she refused to budge.

  Her brother Benjamin owns a second home in Jerusalem, and Kim proposed that we set up there, at least at first; once we’re in place, she said, we can decide on the next steps as the situation develops. I wanted to leave right away. She requested enough time to operate on a patient and ask Ezra Benhaim for a week’s leave of absence. When Ezra tried to penetrate the reasons behind her sudden departure, Kim told him she needed some rest and rehabilitation. Ezra didn’t insist further.

  So the day after the operation, we stuff our two travel bags into the trunk of her Nissan, pass by my house to pick up some personal effects and a few recent photographs of Sihem, and set out for Jerusalem.

  We stop only once, to get some food and drink in a greasy spoon on the highway. The weather’s fine, and the traffic’s so heavy, it makes us think of the summer holiday rush.

  We pass through Jerusalem as in a waking dream. It’s the first time I’ve seen the city in about a dozen years. Its frenetic animation and its bustling, crowded shops recall memories I thought I’d left on the scrap heap. Images flash though my mind, sharp and gleaming, and mingle with the scents of the old town. It was in this age-old city that I saw my mother for the last time. She’d come to pray at her dying brother’s bedside. His funeral brought together the entire tribe; some people came from countries so far away that their names threw the old folks into confusion. My mother didn’t long survive the loss of the person she considered her real reason for living—my father had been a negligent husband, and I, her son, had been stolen from her by my years away at school and my extensive travels.

  Benjamin’s place—on the outskirts of town, among other squat buildings with sunburned walls—seems to turn its back on the legendary city and focus on the orchards that run up and down the rocky hills. The house is discreetly situated, withdrawn from the world and its disorders; somewhere in the distance you can hear the sound of squealing kids at play, but they’re not visible anywhere. Benjamin is in Tel Aviv, so Kim follows his instructions and finds the keys under the third flowerpot from the entrance to the patio. The house is small and low, with a loggia overlooking a shadowy little courtyard jealously protected by a greedy climbing vine. A sculpted fountain with a bronze lion’s head overhangs a bramble-choked rivulet, which runs past a wrought-iron bench clumsily painted green. Kim assigns me to a bedroom next to a study filled with books and manuscripts. There’s a folding bed with a mattress that leaves something to be desired, a Formica table, and a stool. A worn-out, threadbare carpet does its best to camouflage the cracks in the floor, which was apparently laid in biblical times. I throw my bag on the bed and wait until Kim comes out of the bathroom so I can tell her what my plans are.

  “Rest for a while first,” she says.

  “I’m not tired. It’s noon, a good time to find somebody home at my foster sister’s house. There’s no need for you to disturb yourself—I’ll take a taxi.”

  “I have to go with you.”

  “Kim, please. If I have problems, I’ll call you on your cell phone and tell you where to come and pick me up. I don’t think I’ll run into any trouble today. I just want to visit family and friends and reconnoiter the ground.”

  Kim grumbles before she lets me go.

  * * *

  Bethlehem has changed a great deal since the last time I passed through here, more than ten years ago. Hordes of refugees, abandoning their homes in towns and villages lately transformed into shooting ranges, have swelled the population, and Bethlehem now features new conglomerations of cinder-block hovels built one against the other, like barricades. Most of these miserable dwellings stand unfinished,
covered with sheet metal or bristling with scrap iron, their facades pierced by haggard windows and grotesque doors. You’d think you were at a huge collection point, where all the wretched of the earth have arranged to meet in a futile quest for absolution.

  Leaning on canes, with kaffiyehs on their heads and faded vests under their open jackets, emaciated old men are daydreaming in front of their houses, some sitting on stools, others on steps. They gaze into the distance and seem to listen to nothing but their memories, impregnable in their silence and undisturbed by the mighty racket of the urchins around them, squabbling at the top of their voices.

  I have to ask the way several times before a little boy leads me to a big house with crumbling walls. He waits politely until I drop a few coins into his hand, and then vanishes. I knock on an old worm-eaten wooden door and prick up my ears. I hear the sound of slippers shuffling across the floor; then a latch clicks and the door is opened by a woman with a pale, troubled face. It takes me forever to recognize her: it’s Leila, my foster sister. She’s a little over forty-five, but she looks sixty. Her hair has turned white and her features have gone slack; you’d think she was dying.

  She scrutinizes me in confusion.

  “It’s Amin,” I say.

  She starts, then says, “My God!” as though suddenly coming to her senses.

  We fling ourselves against each other. As I hold her tightly against me, I can feel her sobs rising up one by one from her chest and spreading over her frail body in a multitude of vibrations. She takes a step back to contemplate me, her face wet with tears. As a sign of gratitude, she recites a verse from the Qur’an, and then she throws herself into my arms again.

  “Come,” she says. “You’re just in time to share a meal with me.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry. Are you here alone?”

  “Yes. Yasser doesn’t come home until evening.”

  “And your children?”

  “Well, they’ve grown up since you saw them, you know? The girls are married, and Adel and Mahmoud are off on their own.”

  There’s a silence, and then Leila bows her head. “It must be so hard for you,” she says in a toneless voice.

  “It’s the worst thing that could happen to a man,” I admit.

  “I can imagine. I’ve thought about you a lot since the attack. I know how sensitive and fragile you are, and I wondered how someone so thin-skinned could get over such a . . . such a . . .”

  “Disaster,” I say, coming to her aid. “Because that’s what it is, a disaster, and not a small one, either. I’ve come here expressly to find out more about it. I didn’t know anything about Sihem’s plans—frankly, I didn’t have the slightest suspicion of them. And her death seems like such a tragedy. . . . It’s literally crushed me.”

  “Don’t you want to sit down?”

  “No. Tell me, how was she before she set out to do what she did?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did she act? Did she seem to be aware of what she was going to do? Do you think she looked normal, or was there something strange about her?”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “She was in Bethlehem on Friday the twenty-seventh, the day before the attack.”

  “I know, but she didn’t stay long. I was with my eldest daughter—it was her son’s circumcision. I learned about the attack in the car on the way home.”

  Suddenly, she claps her hand to her lips as though to prevent herself from saying anything more. “Good God!” she says. “What a blabbermouth!” She looks at me with terrified eyes. “Why have you come to Bethlehem?”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  She totters, clasping her forehead between her thumb and her index finger. I seize her by the waist to stop her from collapsing and help her sit down on the padded bench behind her.

  “Amin, my brother, I don’t think I have the right to talk about these things. I swear to you, I don’t really know what’s going on. If Yasser finds out I haven’t held my tongue, he’ll cut it off. I was surprised to see you, and I let some words slip out that didn’t belong to me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Amin?”

  “I’ll act as though you haven’t said anything. But I have to know what my wife was up to in your neighborhood and who she was working with.”

  “Have the police sent you?”

  “Let me remind you that Sihem was my wife.”

  Leila’s thinking clearly now, and she’s bitterly angry with herself. “I wasn’t here, Amin. That’s the real truth. You can verify it yourself. I went to my eldest daughter’s house for her son’s circumcision. Your aunts and your cousins were there, and so were lots of other family members and friends you must know. That Friday, I wasn’t home.”

  I see that she’s about to panic and hasten to reassure her: “Calm down, Leila. It’s only me, your brother. I’m not carrying any weapons or handcuffs. I’d hate to cause you any problems, as you well know. And I’m not here to bring down trouble on your family, either. Where can I find Yasser? I want him to be the one who answers my questions.”

  Leila implores me not to tell her husband about our conversation. I promise I won’t. She gives me the address of the pressing shed where Yasser works and walks me to the street to see me off.

  I look for a taxi around the square but don’t see any. At the end of half an hour, just as I’m preparing to give Kim a call, an unauthorized driver offers to drop me off wherever I want for a few shekels. He’s a fairly stocky young man, with laughing eyes and a fanciful little goatee. He opens the door for me with theatrical obsequiousness and practically pushes me into one of the leprous seats in his rattletrap “taxi.”

  We drive around the square, turn into a road scored by deep fissures, and exit the town. After a slalom in the midst of some headlong traffic, we strike out cross-country until we reach a dirt road up in the hills.

  “You’re not from around here?” the driver asks me.

  “No.”

  “Visiting relatives, or on business?”

  “Both.”

  “You come from far away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The driver nods his head. “You’re not the talkative type,” he says.

  “Not today.”

  “I see.”

  We go a few miles on the dusty road without encountering a living soul. The sun beats down hard on the stony hillocks, which seem to be hiding behind one another in order to spy on us.

  The driver speaks again. “Me, I can’t function with tape on my mouth. If I don’t talk, I explode.”

  I keep quiet.

  He clears his throat and goes on: “I’ve never seen anyone with hands so immaculate and well manicured as yours. Are you a doctor, by any chance? Only doctors take such good care of their hands.”

  I turn toward the orchards, which spread out as far as the eye can see.

  Annoyed by my silence, the driver breathes a sigh. Then he rummages around in the glove compartment, extracts a cassette tape, and immediately slips it into the player.

  “Listen to this, my friend,” he says excitedly. “If you’ve never heard Sheikh Marwan preach, you’re missing half your life.”

  He turns a knob to increase the volume. The car is filled with a hubbub of voices, punctuated by ecstatic cries and wild applause. Someone—probably the speaker—taps on the microphone to quiet the crowd. The uproar gradually subsides, flaring up here and there until an attentive silence greets the limpid voice of Imam Marwan.

  “Is there a splendor so great as the Lord’s face, my brothers? Down here in this changeable, flimsy world, are there other splendors great enough to turn us away from the face of Allah? Tell me which splendors they might be. The tawdry illusions that attract the simpleminded and the wretched? The snares and lures? The mirages that hide the trapdoor to the place of the damned, the mirages that blind the deluded and doom them forever? Tell me which splendors, my brothers. And on the last day, when dust is all that shall remain of the earth, when all that s
hall remain of our illusions is the ruin of our souls, what answer shall we have to the question, What have we done with our existence? What answer shall we have when we are asked, all of us, great and small, What have you done with your life? What have you done with my holy prophets and my generous gifts? What have you done with the salvation I entrusted to you? And on that day, my brothers, your fortunes, your relations, your allies, your supporters will give you no help.” (The crowd sets up a clamor, which is quickly dominated by the sheikh’s voice.) “In truth, my brothers, a man’s riches are not what he possesses, but what he leaves behind him. And what do we possess, my brothers? What are we going to leave behind us? A homeland? What homeland? A history? What history? Some monuments? Where are they? By your ancestors, show them to me! Every day, we are dragged through the mud or before the courts. Every day, tanks roll over our feet, overturn our carts, smash our houses, and fire without warning on our children. Every day, the whole world witnesses our misfortune. . . .”

  My arm decompresses and my thumb mashes the eject button, popping out the cassette. The driver is thunderstruck. His eyes bulge, his mouth opens wide, and he cries out, “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t like sermons.”

  “What?” Indignation chokes him. “You don’t believe in God?”

  “I don’t believe in his holy men.”

  He slams on the brakes so hard, his wheels lock up and the car skates sideways for a few meters before it comes to a stop, straddling the road. “Are you mad?” the driver growls, livid with rage. “How dare you raise your hand against Sheikh Marwan?”

  “I have the right. . . .”

  “You have no right! No right! You’re in my automobile. And whether inside my car or out of it, I will not allow a disgusting piece of shit to put his filthy paws on Sheikh Marwan! Now get out of my car and out of my sight.”