by Amy Wilentz
Doron watched the kerchiefed boys preparing another onslaught. He knew that what was unhappily called a situation had developed on his watch. Behind the boys, the crowd was moving toward the checkpoint again. Doron thought about percussion grenades, good for stopping animal stampedes—or starting them—and for stopping running crowds in their tracks without causing casualties. Certainly no matter what he ended up doing, it would be found that he had done something wrong, had forgotten to do something, had neglected something that right now, right now, should seem utterly obvious to him as a course of action. He was sure that firing on the crowd at this point would be a mistake. On the other hand, he didn’t want to be a sitting duck for some kind of unprecedented attack on the checkpoint.
“Let’s launch a sound bomb,” Doron said. It was getting too close, they were getting too cocky. It had to end. There was a moment past which you could not let things continue, or the escalation might prove unstoppable. Doron stood out in front of his men while they prepared the percussion weapon. Rocks were coming at him from three sides. It was raining rocks. Doron felt an urgent need to reassert control. He knew he could do it. It was going to happen now. We can always win, he thought. He reminded himself: The one who gains victory in close quarters is the one with superior firepower—and the will to use it. That last bit had always been Doron’s problem.
• • •
A SHATTERING NOISE shook the ground. They are bombing us, Marina thought. That’s impossible. She had never heard of bombs, not at the checkpoints. This one was so loud the shock seemed to continue in waves under her feet like an earthquake. She trembled and thought about natural disasters. She didn’t see anyone lying bloody and wounded, the way they would after a bombing. No buildings collapsed.
Another tremor rattled the ground. Maybe they’re trying to end it, Marina thought. The windows of the businesses along the street rattled and one or two shattered as another blast shook the street. She closed her eyes tight and prayed that they would get across. She tried to make her way to the checkpoint, but the crowd kept pushing her back.
• • •
DORON WATCHED the crowd flee from the waves of the explosion. The blast rippled under his feet and he thought it would toss him into the air. The crowd felt the same thing: it was like an earthquake. He gave a signal to launch another bomb. One or two more, and they’d be so far gone they would never regroup. Doron wished fervently never to see another Palestinian. Dream on, he said to himself, tapping his foot, waiting for the end, his gun at the ready.
In a few minutes, he knew it was over. No shouting, no tramping, no stones. Not a single one.
“Hooray,” he heard Zvili say to another man.
Hooray is right, Doron thought. It was over for today. As usual, the sound grenades had worked, combined with a massive dose of tear gas and a few strategic bursts of shots fired into the air. At least there would be an interlude of calm until tomorrow, although it would be an interlude filled with stretchers on the Palestinian side, and exhausted, bleeding soldiers at the checkpoint. His men were gathering around the watchtower. Now was the time to deal with the aftermath. Normally, the men would all be smoking after such an afternoon, but they were coughing too hard. Dust caked over the bloody face of the man who’d been hit, a private, first time on the checkpoint. He was looking for water and a towel. Doron handed him his water bottle as he passed by. A light injury—but he’d send the man to get stitched up, anyway.
Doron could see several yards of road now, a stretch of beautiful, radiant, black macadam, with no one standing on it. The roadbed. Amazing. He looked at the few yards of blackness as if it were an old buddy returning from war. He wanted to kiss it, slap it on the back, offer it a beer. The road was decorated with dust, dirt, sand, rubble, and stray sandals and shoes lost in the melee.
Not everyone left, of course. There were always a few troublemakers, and some people who, Doron supposed, were desperate to get across. But wouldn’t. Zvili appeared at his side and handed him a cigarette. Doron took it and looked at Zvili with a pained smile on his face.
“Good work, Lieutenant,” Zvili said.
“Thank God it’s over,” said Doron. They went into the trailer.
It was growing dark fast. Zvili flicked on the fluorescent bulb with an elbow. Two of the men who had been out front had returned to the trailer. One parked himself at the desk near the radio with his feet up, and the other sat backward on a metal folding chair, reading the log sheet. The bleeding soldier stood against the wall in a dark corner, with a bloody piece of someone’s old shirt balled in his hand and blood still trickling into his eye and down his face. He shook his head as Doron examined him.
“You’ve got to have someone see that,” Doron said. Doron took the bloody rag and made some swipes at the private’s face.
“I’m fine,” said the man.
“Don’t be brave,” said Doron.
Zvili polished his sunglasses on the edges of his flak jacket. He returned them to their case.
“Everything cool?” asked Zvili, looking out. This was code.
“Yes,” said Doron. “No one dead, as far as I can tell.” They watched as an injured man on a stretcher was carried away in the direction of Ramallah. It was always possible that a couple of Palestinians would turn up dead after the riots finished; people you hadn’t noticed go down.
“So what else?” Zvili asked. “What are we going to do with these folks?” He gestured to the stragglers coming up the road. “Look at that guy,” he said, pointing at a man in a suit, standing near the bench outside. “Why the fuck does he need to get across, I’d like to know. I mean really.”
“Don’t worry,” said Doron. “He’s not going anywhere. One guy came through this morning. Authority. Special plates and a special paper just for today. That’s been it. Orders are no exceptions. Headquarters is scared shitless. They don’t want anyone sneaking through. They’ve even closed off the wadi.”
“Yeah,” said Zvili. “Makes me want to cry.”
Sometimes, Doron wished there was something really bad he could do to Zvili, instead of fucking over all these pointless Palestinians. Still, the world would be a better place with no Palestinians in it, he often thought. And Zvili was his comrade, supposedly. He had worked with him before at this checkpoint. He had even had a beer at Zvili’s house after a hard day. Once. He tried not to dislike Zvili, but Zvili didn’t make it easy. Doron turned to the guardroom.
“Be down in a minute,” he said. He walked out and climbed slowly up the metal staircase to the watchtower. He liked to survey things at sundown—this was his personal minaret. The man on watch edged aside, and Doron peered down. Things seemed normal. It looked like every night along this road. It was colder, darker, too, without the headlights from the usual traffic that was deterred tonight. Cypresses rose like the shadows of flames from the crest of the hill running behind the wadi. The rain would start soon.
• • •
DOWN ON THE road, everyone headed home, shocked by the sound bombs and undone by the growing dark and the storm that was descending. But Marina could not go home. Ibrahim’s eyes were closed. He wheezed loudly at the end of each short breath. The crowd was breaking up, each person an individual again, with his own plans for the night. The man stationed up in the watchtower leaned on the window ledge with a bored look on his face, pointing his machine gun down at a straggling line of people who were making their way toward the checkpoint in the near dark.
Marina started to run down the road toward the watchtower, with one shoe gone and Ibrahim panting in her arms. At least now there was space to run. At the guardroom, she would plead her case. Those Israeli soldiers who looked at you as if you weren’t the same species. She knew them. Their impassive faces, deathly indifference, like Roman praetorians. She’d have to beg, plead, get down on her knees. She hated having to do it; she liked looking away as she presented her documents, getting through, no arguments, no contact, no humiliation. Nothing personal. She had always
sworn that if it came to total closure, she would never beg, never degrade herself that way. She’d happily stay in Ramallah, except for her visits to Hassan. What, after all, did Jerusalem have that Ramallah didn’t? But that was before Ibrahim got sick again. She knew the answer to her old question, now: Jerusalem had Hadassah Hospital.
• • •
DORON BREATHED IN the wet, fresh air. After a hot dusty day, you almost felt clean, up here in the watchtower. He leaned out the opening and looked down at the stragglers waiting outside the guardroom. The sole bench in front, which seated six or seven, was full. In spite of the rain clouds that were building toward blackness above them, a few small groups huddled in conversation near the bench. And heading down toward the checkpoint trailer across the road, coming at a run, almost, but graceful and dignified, was a slender woman in blue jeans, with long, uncovered hair, a beautiful woman, really, Doron could see, carrying a child. One of her shoes was missing.
CHAPTER TWO
GEORGE WAS TERRIBLY TIRED. THE trip back to boston had been long, and he was still edgy with jet lag a week later. He hated traveling: wasted time. And now that he was home, he realized he had been in no condition to deal with the vagaries of his trip. Sitting in the security zone at the airport in Frankfurt for three hours, waiting for a late connection, he had been lonely and bored and irritated. The newspapers bored him, his German was not what it had been, he hadn’t brought enough books or magazines he could bear opening, much less reading. It was extremely unpleasant. Just hoisting himself up out of those deep seats to go to the bathroom or to get a cup of coffee, a bad cup of coffee but a necessary cup of coffee, was a physical endeavor more difficult than he could have imagined, after only a four-hour flight from Tel Aviv. He was sick and getting old at the same time, and he was not enjoying it. Before he left Boston on this pointless journey, he had sworn to himself that he was not going to let the terrible fatigue stop him. His credo had always been to do what was necessary, to keep his connection to Palestine alive, to give an important part of his energy to The Cause (he always said those two words in a deep ironic tone, the meaning of which—of course—no other Palestinian, except Sandra, could understand; Palestinians said “the cause” as if it still had real meaning . . . ). Do what was necessary for The Cause, no matter the cost, he told himself. But now that he was back, he was wondering.
That movie on the plane out of Tel Aviv! It was the most enjoyable part of this last visit. It was the kind of thing he loved: evil CIA agents, a beautiful blond, a secret installation, a ridiculous gang of swarthy foreigners of uncertain origins. One scene remained fixed in his mind. The towering CIA man gives orders to his shady, third-world ally, and the dark-skinned man bows just slightly from the waist in receiving his commands. That little diffident hint of a bow, both acquiescent and defiant, reminded him of Ahmed. George had seen Ahmed give that little bow only last week, as he dismissed someone he was pretending to respect.
Since his heart attack, it was impossible for George to take the kind of pleasure he used to in the regular events of life. When he went down to New York, to give lectures on Palestine or to attend cardiology conferences, he was tired and at his least sociable, not like in the old days—which weren’t so old or so long ago. New York in the old days had been the scene of his glory: parties, congresses, fund-raising banquets, gatherings to whom he spoke about The Cause (without irony, in public), and the fate of his people. But now, with Sandra dead and his heart still unrecovered, he almost always said no. He didn’t feel like making the effort. He might have taken his old comfort in the accoutrements of wealth one found at New York parties: the rich upholstery and linens and flatware, the sparkling glasses, the high ceilings, the catered food, the clink and laughter, the talk—it reminded him of evenings in his parents’ dining room. But he missed Sandra. And he hated looking down at a full plate and wanting nothing.
At lunchtime on a weekday, his part of Cambridge was silent. Everyone had already gone off to work. George put his cup and saucer down, turned on the television, and leaned back into the easy chair that his father had had carried out of their house in Jerusalem so long ago. The chair that, later, he had taken from Amman to London, and then up to Oxford, that he and Sandra had stuck on a steamer to cross the Atlantic, and then lugged up to Boston in a U-Haul, all of this back when his life was just beginning. George flipped through the channels. Tennis, would it be the Open? Yes, there was Australia in the promotional shots: that odd harbor at Sydney, kangaroos looking perplexed in a parking lot. The defending Czech was playing a Swede.
George hoped the phone would not ring. Some new minuscule section of the so-called peace process was being implemented today—or was it tomorrow? yesterday?—and he was afraid the media deluge might start up again. What was there to say, after all?
Tennis relaxed him. He loved to watch the ball go back and forth. Pock, pock, pock, pock. No sound was more soothing. Now only politics could get him going, bring the blood to his face. He would never have imagined that it was possible, but Palestine was the only thing left that aroused his passion.
Love, forty. Good, the Czech was winning. All those damned get-togethers in Jerusalem. They always invited him very courteously when they had an important cabinet meeting, or if there was a big holiday celebration and they needed a rousing speaker. He was still “advising” Ahmed and the Chairman and the Authority, even though they no longer listened to him, no longer took him seriously. It was the political equivalent of Ahmed’s little bow—respect combined with dismissal. You couldn’t criticize them and think they would accept you in any way other than formally, nominally. But they needed him, still, they needed him.
Ahmed was his best friend, or used to be—decades and decades ago. They had shared hours and hours at school and in the afternoons, in Jerusalem and later in Amman, over tea or coffee, Ahmed stretched out on the sofa and George lying on the carpet in a corner of Ahmed’s father’s dark study, talking about politics and girls, daydreaming about returning home. George was still disarmed by Ahmed’s brilliant smile, and yet Ahmed was a part of the whole corrupt contraption. He was dispensing jobs to cronies, selling ministries to high bidders, the whole shebang, George thought. He seemed to have lost sight of The Cause. George believed that Ahmed was just getting on with things, business as usual, petty politicking, jabbering with the Chairman as if the two of them were a couple of old hacks. Yet Ahmed was vibrant in some atavistic way. He seemed to store his own heat. On George’s last trip, the chill of Palestine’s winter had crept into his bones, he’d felt it even in the overheated library in Bethlehem where he’d given a talk. But Ahmed walked in from a cold driving wind blazing like a furnace.
Well, they were all virtually dead now, as Sandra used to say, many of them well past sixty. George always caught himself on the verge of walking out of meetings, leaving Ahmed and the boys behind to natter until the end of time about who should control Abdul’s orchard near Dah’riyeh, and who would get those two hectares of scrub brush outside Deir el-Ghuson. The whole rickety edifice made him tap his foot with annoyance. Maybe one day he really would just split and head over to see some big brutal American movie at some big brutal shopping mall on the Israeli side. Wouldn’t that shock them? He was running out of patience.
He had accomplished precisely nothing in Palestine this last time, precisely zilch. Marina kept pushing him to leave Ramallah and go for a ride through the other side of Jerusalem, the side where he spent his childhood, the places he had told her so much about when she was small. Just to see, she said, just to see. George couldn’t explain to his daughter—who had grown up undisturbed in America—how very much he didn’t want to. He still felt—after fifty years—like a child who had been suddenly orphaned; he was still suffering from the shock of the Israeli takeover in that unbelievable spring of 1948. His whole life had been cut off from him when he was only eight years old. When the family fled to Amman, George’s world had changed as if he’d been transported to an alien planet. He f
elt awkward about revisiting a past that had been denied to him for so long, a past that—really—he had never been allowed to experience. Still Marina pushed him—she argued for it with the directness of someone who had only suffered secondhand.
He’d done it, finally, but he hadn’t set foot outside the car. Saw a house, and felt for the key his father had given him, that he always took with him on long trips. There it was, in his jacket pocket, long and smooth. It was made of iron and it felt heavy in his hand. The end was wrought into the shape of a fleur-de-lis. He remembered how he had worked to make it one of Marina’s favorite objects—her talisman, too—when she was little. He had dangled the shining key before her fascinated eyes so many times that she imagined it had magical powers. He held it briefly, and looked up at the house. He saw a path he remembered—it led down to the renters’ apartment in the back, and the henhouse and pigeonry that had been tended by his nursemaid. He saw the old arched windows. The towering cypress that hid half the garden. A sign that said LOVERS OF ZION STREET—in Hebrew, Hovevei Zion. Well, that was new. Funny name for his old street. Saw unfamiliar people, new buildings, paved streets. Blue sky. And then on to another meeting.
All right, I’ve done it now, he said to Marina.
He would love a sweet, but in Cambridge good Arab sweets were still hard to find. Sweets with coffee, perhaps the only reason left now to visit the West Bank. Pock. Ah, the Czech was clever—a wicked backhand crosscourt, and at net. George sipped at his coffee and remembered the little nests of honey and pistachios from Nazareth that he had eaten while he was visiting Marina and Ibrahim in Ramallah. His daughter seemed happy, he supposed, under the circumstances. She was still missing her mother. She pushed more sweets on him, too much coffee, watching him with judging eyes when she thought he wasn’t looking. He hadn’t been taken to see the husband, and he assumed that that was no oversight.