by Amy Wilentz
George was exhausted today beyond imagining. Jet lag in one direction, jet lag back. For no one but Marina would George have roused himself once more in his condition, much less flown halfway round the world and walked for a mile in front of cameras to a place where he would have to stand for at least an hour in a cold, unpitying wind.
The first callers had merely stunned him, and left him cold with incredulity, suspecting some kind of a hoax. But Marina, calling from Ramallah, had convinced him, and sent George into a torrent of action. He knew it was Marina because when he picked up the receiver, no one spoke. He kept saying, “Darling, darling,” and on the other end there was nothing but the oceanic emptiness of an international connection.
This never happened to him, this inability, this fear of confronting whatever was coming to meet him. What could he say that would help her? Nothing, nothing. It was beyond his control. She was two oceans away, Christ, thousands of miles, a world away, no comfort could reach her. I’m coming, he said to her. Finally, he heard her click off. Blood seemed to drain away from him. He felt himself fading and grabbed onto the edge of his desk for support. He dumped himself into his desk chair.
“Philip,” he’d called. His voice sounded faint, even to him. But Philip came in.
He must have been waiting just outside the door, expecting to be summoned. Obviously, he already knew everything. He came too close. George waved him back a little. George saw tears in his eyes.
“No, no, no,” George said to him, sinking farther back in his chair and covering his own eyes with his forearm. “Philip. That’s too much sympathy. I can’t stand it, really.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Philip said, standing there with his hands oddly clasped together.
“Just don’t touch me, if you were thinking of it,” George said.
“No,” Philip said. “No, I won’t.”
And now here Philip was, in a graveyard in East Jerusalem, bothering to be furious at some noisy cameraman. Dear boy. What a good idea to bring him. Philip was having all George’s emotions for him. Philip was in charge of emotions and political thought: outrage at the Israelis, lucid understanding of the Palestinian politicians who were making hay out of the tragedy, canny but diplomatic. Very useful. George might as well be dead already. As he watched them pray over the small, shrouded body, he wished he were.
Reading Al-Quds over the breakfast he could not bring himself to taste that morning, George had felt tears sting his eyes for the first time. That was typical of him, to feel something only when it was in writing, only at that safe, mediated distance, when it was more like art or spectacle than like something that was really happening, and to him. He had emotions the way a pornography enthusiast had sex. There was something about the use of the word gasp that did it. The editors of Al-Quds wrote that Ibrahim had been detained at the checkpoint because he was Hassan Hajimi’s child. Hajimi, they reminded their readers, was a disaffected young follower of the Chairman who had turned to Hamas in the past two years.
They wrote that the boy had been visibly gasping—that word—for two hours while his mother, incidentally the daughter of George Raad, the physician and writer (“incidentally”—George noticed that), waited for the officers at the checkpoint to examine and approve the boy’s medical documents. That a new, superstrong U.S.-issued tear gas had been used, for the first time, on the crowd at the checkpoint, and had gravely exacerbated the child’s respiratory distress. The editors noted that Ibrahim Hajimi was Hassan Hajimi’s only child and George Raad’s only grandchild. Hajimi, they went on, had been in and out of Israeli prisons since he was first arrested in a general sweep in Jenin in 1992. They added that Raad had recently been ill. Somehow, they managed to imply that all of this—the desperation of the Palestinian people, the prisons, the lack of offspring in Marina’s family, the gasping, George’s own condition—was the fault of the officers at the checkpoint. Philip was drinking coffee and reading over George’s shoulder. George looked up at him, and Philip shook his head, pointing down to several errors in the Arabic typography, and an incorrect identification of George’s great-grandfather, the family patriarch, in an old photograph. Ignoring painful content. Attaboy, Philip—trained at the foot of the master.
He was glad Philip was with him, because it was so hard right now to be with Marina. George could barely bring himself to talk to her or to touch her, she seemed so alien and past helping. Her sorrow was transforming her. She had welcomed him the morning he arrived by walking into his arms and sobbing there for a long minute, as he could recall her having done when she was little. He held her and remembered all the stooping and hugging he’d done then, the enclosing arms and bent head and pathetic useless doglike murmurs that were meant to console his child for the broken dolls and spilled glitter and fights with friends and ruined dresses. He cherished those few moments after he arrived back in Ramallah, moments during which he felt himself give way the smallest bit, felt himself feel something along with her, felt the loss of her little boy who had been so delightful and full of interest and amusement. His grandson. He knew it would catch up with him later, when he wasn’t trying, wasn’t ready for it.
After that initial outburst, Marina retreated. She seemed distant, even when she was not sitting curled up in a corner with her head buried in her hands and her hands buried in her hair. George busied himself with plans for her trip down to see Hassan at al-Moscobiyyeh, the lockup in downtown Jerusalem, when he realized that she didn’t need documents, special plates, VIP papers, or an okay from the Chairman now. She could just take a taxi to the checkpoint, walk across, and take another taxi into town. No one at the checkpoint minded now who her husband was, not after what had happened. The closure was still on, but the Israelis would not stop her again.
• • •
IN THE CORNER of the cemetery, a shadow flickered between two of the grand old Arab cenotaphs. Doron was trying to hide himself, here in alien territory. Just a few days ago, he had been a good soldier, in a smart uniform. Today, he was the unnamed baby-killer, dressed in civilian clothes. He huddled in a corner and tightened his blue-jean jacket. This was the kind of place he had never been to, a place where he would never go: in Arab Jerusalem, among the enemy. But Doron couldn’t help himself, he had to be there, it was an obligation. He still couldn’t believe what had happened; he had never seen a dead child before, not in all his days on the checkpoints, not in Lebanon, even.
Doron did not know what to do with himself. He fidgeted, smoked a cigarette. He hoped he could not be seen over here, kicking at a stone, stepping over sage and sorrel plants, half hidden behind a big gray mausoleum and a dusty, swaying willow. He did not think any Israeli would survive being discovered in this place right now. He could just make out the individual mourners—the boy’s grandfather was there, he saw, a dark young man at his side. Doron watched the procession coming down that hill toward him. He remembered the back of the mother’s bent head as she sobbed over her boy. Her whole life came to an end right there in front of him, and he could do nothing for her. “Please help me,” she’d said toward the very end. He’d had an impulse to console her, to offer kind platitudes, the way he was used to doing with the bereaved. Instead, he had to stand there like a soldier, and take it. When he finally touched her arm, after, she recoiled. He remembered that. Well, she was right.
Tomorrow he was to appear before a military investigator. Headquarters would stand by him, of course. He would tell them about the man he finally reached somewhere, working late in some office in the high tower of the Defense Department in Tel Aviv, who had ordered him not to allow the Hajimi family to cross. Maybe he could even show them the secure number. He might have it somewhere, stuffed into a pocket.
His mother had tried to console him, as if that were possible. He could hear the worry in her voice over the phone.
“Look,” she’d said to him. “The army will stand by you if you stand by them. They believe that protecting your name is the same as protecting theirs.”
“Yeah.”
“You did your best,” she said. “Poor little child.”
How had the boy ended up dead? Doron didn’t understand it. Someone on the phone in a distant city by the sea had told him not to let them in, but he didn’t even get the man’s name. And in any case, you didn’t always have to follow orders. Well, he hadn’t really. The ambulance had come, he had contacted headquarters, they had refused her request, he had been about to let them in anyway, over Zvili’s indignant protest, and it was fate alone that had brought help there only after the boy was beyond saving. He told himself all this. But he knew he should have let them through the minute they appeared at the trailer door.
He still wasn’t hungry. He had barely eaten since he left the checkpoint. When he focused on the graveyard crowd again, he thought he might be hallucinating, there were so many people flowing down to the graveyard, covering the hillside, too many for a funeral by far. Too many. With flags and banners. Flags and banners, so unkind, so festive and inappropriate. But of course, this was not just any funeral. This was his own funeral, Doron kept thinking. Up front, where a white-turbaned sheikh was standing, Doron could see Raad, in black, slender, erect.
The Raad family. An old Palestinian family, he had read. They looked as if they were people just like his own family. But they weren’t. They were Palestinians. And now they were going to be victims: a family with a martyr. Their little boy was dead. The banners were waving for Ibrahim. Now Doron knew the child’s name. Another banner slowly unfurled at the top of the hill. IN ISRAEL, it read in English, SOLDIERS KILL BABIES. Doron leaned against the willow. He could hear the crowd roaring and chanting. The banners flickered and waved in the wind. They snapped and flickered, and his head hurt. He needed to eat.
He was afraid to see the bier go down. He crushed out his cigarette and wandered up the hill, making sure to keep some distance from the watchful cameramen and the crowd. Not that anyone would recognize him. When he reached the crest, Doron looked down over the heads of the crowd and the backs of the banners to the valley where a little bunch of people was locked in a knot around the burial mound. Doron wished that women were allowed to attend. He remembered the exact tilt of Marina Raad’s head as she sat desperately filling out her forms, the exact color of her dark eyes, the exact anger in her penetrating, dismissive regard. Then again, he was grateful that women were forbidden. He didn’t think he could bear to see her. And what if she saw him?
• • •
GEORGE LISTENED TO the old man talking. Normally, George loved funerals. Who wouldn’t? The sheer joy at not being dead, the delight in the presence of dozens of other living beings, the uplifting thought that you get to carry on eating and fucking and breathing and shitting, while some other poor mortal is going down to nothingness. But the funeral of a child was different and the funeral of this child was not something he was prepared for.
He looked at the sheikh. He was nervous about the old man standing there in his turban; he mistrusted anything left to the discretion of clergymen. George dreaded the eulogy, which was not traditional at Muslim funerals, and was bound to be political (what else could you say about a baby’s short life?), but Marina had accepted it when it was suggested by friends of Hassan’s. The sheikh’s white-wrapped fez—a sign that he had made the haj to Mecca—reflected the strong sun. He gave a dry cough of self-importance, and began to speak.
“We are all here today because, again, a Palestinian has died at the hands of the Israelis,” he said in a low voice. He paused dramatically.
No, no, no. George wanted to correct him. I beg to differ. That isn’t why I came here today, haji. I came because my little boy is dead.
“A Palestinian, a fine baby boy. A boy who flourished in his parents’ love, but who was never to learn about his people and his stolen homeland, never to become another brave warrior in the battle for Palestinian liberation.” The sheikh shook his head somberly and looked down at his notes. Notes? What could notes for such palpable drivel say? Pal boy innocent . . . /Zionist enemy to blame . . . /Pal people must advance to final goal . . . /Push Zionist enemy into sea . . . /Burn ground beneath feet of Zionist occupation force???
“When we consider this young boy’s mother,” the sheikh went on, squinting up at the crowd, “we cannot help but feel a burst of pride, pride in her composure, her courage, her stubborn will, her clear desire to continue the battle no matter the cost.” George felt Philip tremble next to him. The Palestinian people, thought George. He sensed their impending introduction into the funeral oration. He could always predict the moment when The Palestinian People would enter the speeches of Palestinians. Almost invariably, he was correct. By now it had become a joke between him and Philip.
At the back of the crowd, listening to the doddering ancient prattle away, the young men who were supposed to be today’s brave warriors cheered wildly and leaped up and down and made the bright banners they were holding wiggle like eels flashing and glinting in the sun. This is the Palestinian people, George reflected as he heard the cheering get louder, then fade, then start up again. What are they cheering about?
“She is a shining example to the Palestinian people,” the sheikh continued. Although vindicated, George found himself overtaken by a wave of helpless anger. He tried to imagine Marina as a kind of heroic female standard-bearer for the future Palestinian liberation, but all he could see was the lonely creature he had left at the door to the kitchen in the house in Ramallah, in her stark veil, surrounded by the silent sisters-in-law. My daughter, who used to wear ribbons in her hair and play Chinese jump rope on an American playground. After all, she had only been trying to get her boy to the doctor. If Ibrahim had made it across alive, Marina would have been just another desperate Palestinian mother accommodating herself to humiliating Israeli demands. It was only her dead child in that awful shroud that gave her this sudden political stature. George wanted to spit the empty words back into the sheikh’s face. But the poor stupid old geezbag was only doing his job, and life also was stupid.
George succumbed to a flash of unsummoned memory: Ibrahim leaping off the foldout bed at Marina’s, wearing his floppy red slippers and waving a golden plastic sword. Ibrahim with a sword—it played on George’s love of Palestinian history; at school in Jerusalem, every boy in his class wanted more than anything to ride in the saber-wielding cavalry of a nineteenth-century Middle Eastern army. And Ibrahim that day was like a cavalryman. He hurled himself into the air with no thought to his own safety and utter trust that he would land on his feet. George remembered. The gold blade flashed.
George wanted to go back in time. What if he’d been there at the checkpoint, been in charge of his family, hadn’t left Ramallah to return to comfortable Cambridge? He could have fixed things, saved the boy, stepped in. George wanted a time machine, only for this one thing. Time machine: he hadn’t even thought of those two words since his school days. But now he did. Open the door. Fasten the seat belt. Press the button, pull the lever. Zap, and there you were, in the past. Not to right the wrongs done his people nor to rewrite history, nor to do any of the historic deeds he’d planned and failed to accomplish, but just to do that one simple small thing. In memory the boy kept falling and falling through the bright air, sword flashing, down toward the bottom of the world, where his grandfather scooped him up before he hurt himself, and kissed him.
George felt as if he might black out. He wondered if his childhood asthma was returning. Shortness of breath often precedes a heart attack, he well knew. But perhaps it was sympathetic asthma, adult onset. Just behind the sheikh’s left shoulder, he saw Ahmed Amr whispering to a flunky who had a cell phone at his other ear. George did not want to fall apart here, in front of everyone.
He looked down into the hole next to the bier. Why did the time after death seem so different from the time before birth? You’ve already managed not to exist quite nicely during the one, he thought. You’ll probably get through the other. You couldn’t say that one black
period was longer than the other, or qualitatively better or worse. But having been alive, you felt somehow a morbid nostalgia for living when it came to flinging the mind forward into the grave. History—dinosaurs, wars, harvest festivals, trilobites, druids, plagues, diplomacy, droughts, music, and the like, worms, snails, and starfish—came before birth, full of facts and events. Eternity, empty and blank and possibly unpleasant, came after.
As a doctor, George had come to the ugly conclusion that fate existed, biologically, even though he’d rejected the concept long ago as philosophically repugnant. How many hearts had he watched detonate, just as the hearts of the preceding generation had and the generation before that one, so many in one family dying early of a final, dramatic coronary seizure. What was in your genes had been in the genes of your ancestors millennia ago: prehistoric hairy peoples who wandered the steppes or the plains or the jungles, who carried sharp weapons and wore negligible clothing and did not read books. Maybe in George’s own asthmatic chromosomes, it was written that his grandson would die of asthma, and given the family’s geographic origins, it could be predicted that the boy would die of that asthma in Palestine, and given history, why should it not happen during a closure, at a checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank?
History and genetics were not so far removed from each other, just like geology and biology. The primordial ooze was still pretty much the primordial ooze, pushed and shoved into different packages down through the eons. All life was like a cartoon monster arising from the squelching swamp, feet trailing mud. Why, for example, should human life require zinc or potassium or iron or salt? But it did. The holy texts said we were made of dirt, and on that point at least they were not wrong. Ooze, all of us. He remembered sitting quietly with Ibrahim on his lap while Marina snapped their picture. The boy laughed for each photo, but only after the flash went off and the picture had been taken. And so the smile was lost.