by Amy Wilentz
He opened his eyes again: this place was empty, too, and musty. One scholar sat at a far table, bent over a decaying monograph. Doron had never been to the Islamic library before; he hadn’t even known that this odd artifact of Muslim culture existed in his part of Jerusalem. The reading room was an upstairs afterthought in a museum that seemed to be dedicated to numbing exhibits of Islamic calligraphy or Arab copperware. Thick, sparkling dust floated in great rays of sunlight that swept down from the high windows. It was cold up here, as if the heat hadn’t been turned on all winter. The librarian was watching him—she was a helpful, middle-aged lady, and she wore glasses, just like a good librarian. She let him use the Xerox machine for free, because he was a soldier.
He had read three books by George Raad so far, including The Perils of Peace, the famous one that had been translated into Arabic by his daughter. The book was dedicated to her: “For my daughter Marina.”
It was an amazing book, to Doron. Maybe wrong, obviously anti-Israeli, possibly crazy, clearly full of bitterness. The guy said he supported peace and then went on to undermine every Palestinian associated with the process—shit, they must be angry at him. Poor Raad. He was a man who never got over losing his family home—a spoiled little rich boy. Still, Raad had a Palestinian point of view and Doron had never read anything by a Palestinian before. He examined the photograph of Raad on the book jacket. He looked patrician and arrogant. He actually looked down his nose, and he had a cast of face that said, I’m clever. There was a strength in his features that was like his daughter’s, Doron thought. Not the kind of people you want to cross. Father and daughter had a light of intelligence and temper in their eyes. George Raad was a handsome man, Doron could see that. He felt strongly that Raad was not someone he himself would like, but then, they were enemies.
Doron had an appointment to see Colonel Daniel Yizhar at one o’clock. He didn’t want to go. He’d been in The Building only once before, to get his ID card. Official Israeli buildings were depressing, filled with depressing people. He’d rather go to the beach, or even to the Kinneret, he’d rather flee, but that wasn’t an option. Doron felt trapped, and he knew the feeling was not going to go away. Shortness of breath was a symptom of panic, he learned that in training. It had come on him while the boy was dying, and he still felt as if his lungs ended at the top of his rib cage.
• • •
HE WAS LONGING for the comfort of his mother’s terrace. He took a bus from the library up to King George Street, and walked through the dust and mud stirred up by a team of backhoes and bulldozers over to the house. Doron’s old neighborhood was filled with children getting out of school. A handful of kids sputtered from the bakery, eating powdery cookies and drinking Diet Cokes. One of Jerusalem’s many daily rush hours was building. A group of young soldiers in olive drab walked by, their rifles swinging from their shoulder straps and clicking against one another. The street filled up with cars and red buses. A soldier with a rifle guarded each bus stop, and the bus stops were crowded again, in spite of the bombings. Short lines formed at the kiosks that sold stamps and lotto tickets and blue municipal parking cards. Faded Israeli flags hung across a few high terraces.
As Doron passed the butcher’s, a young mother in blue jeans pushed through the doors, lifted a stroller down the stoop, and headed off. Doron followed her. She was relaxed, walking lightly, easily, comfortably. At the florist’s she stopped and Doron stopped a few yards behind her. She leaned over a bucket of red roses and breathed. A bunch of delphiniums brushed her cheek. She pulled a rose from the bucket and waved it in front of the stroller’s occupant. Satisfied, she put the rose back. She adjusted the plastic bags that swung and slid along the stroller’s handles, shifted her small, neat backpack from one shoulder to the other, and moved on, stopping halfway down the block to kick off the heel of her shoe and remove a pebble. Then she turned down a tree-lined side street near the chocolate shop, and was gone.
Doron had to lean up against the florist’s to catch his breath. He stood in front of the flower stall, staring at the selection. He tried to remember the name of every flower before him, the names his mother had taught him so painstakingly over the years. Roses and delphiniums, lilies and geraniums and pansies for potted gardens, and hyssops and cyclamen to grow out of terrace walls. Rockrose, hawthorn, and Spanish broom, onion flowers and crocus and lavender. He would not be sending flowers to Ibrahim’s mother. The crocus looked so tender; he remembered the little yellow ones from his own front yard. When he was small, he used to pick them and make soup: water, mud, and crocus petals. He imagined himself with tenderness, a little boy kneeling in the mud.
• • •
“YOU’RE BREATHING FUNNY,” his mother said when she came to the door. She held on to his arm and inspected him.
“I feel a little light-headed,” Doron told her. He was more comfortable outside where the air was light and wafting. Inside, it was dark and heavy. His mother had too many Persian carpets. One after another, the rugs seemed to spin Doron down the hallway as he followed his mother’s backlit figure, her hair a halo of red fuzz, to the French doors that opened onto the terrace. He sat down heavily on the old, faded couch, and she lowered herself down next to him. She was getting smaller and wider and stiff with age.
Doron and his mother sat out in the cold on the terrace, eating olives companionably. The salt seemed to conquer his nausea. His mother was wearing sandals and a comforting faded housedress printed with huge leaves and tropical flowers. In the garden on the terrace, it served almost as camouflage. His mother kept stealing little looks at Doron when she felt he might not notice. For a long time, they didn’t speak, sitting there side by side, picking olives out of the glass dish and listening to the sound of the olive pits slipping back onto the glass table. A mourning dove cooed in the old olive tree around the corner. “A tree from the time of the Crucifixion!” his mother liked to announce to her guests, gleefully. She believed visitors to Jerusalem thought that everything that was old in the Holy Land dated from the Crucifixion. Just beyond the terrace wall, Doron could see that the lemon trees were full of fruit. A few big yellow globes had dropped onto the terrace floor and rolled under the flowerbeds.
“The bird sounds sad today, doesn’t he?” Doron said.
“Please,” she said. “The bird sounds the way he always sounds.”
“Probably,” said Doron. “Good olives, Mother.” He took another.
“Red pepper-cured. Listen, what is going on?” she said. She smoothed his cheek with her hand, and he knew she was worried. Normally, she was circumspect about showing her affection.
“You’ve read the paper?” she asked.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” his mother asked. He knew she wouldn’t question him about details of the incident—she was not a soldier’s widow for nothing.
“I don’t know. I tried yesterday but it makes me too nervous. Too upset, I guess. I don’t want to know too much about what they’re saying. I feel ashamed. Not having them mention your name, it’s as if something just too shameful has happened to you. You can read them for me.”
“You may not want to know too much, but you have to know what the army is saying, and what the Authority is saying,” she said. “You have to protect yourself. Wait.” She patted his leg. “I’ll read it to you. Will that be okay?”
She left the terrace to get her glasses, came back with the paper, and read some paragraphs to her son. It was the army spin: the Israeli Defense Forces were always on top of a story like this one, Doron knew. Ha’aretz said that as far as the top command knew at this point, the men at the checkpoint had gone by the book. The fifteen minutes the boy and his mother had waited were consistent with procedure for medical laisser-passers.
“Fifteen minutes, Mother?” Doron said. “God, it was much longer than that.”
“Time can seem to go slowly in a crisis,” she replied.
There had been some concern about the woman’s husband, an alleged
Hamas mastermind, and possibly part of the ring responsible for the recent bus bombings, according to military sources. “The duty officers’ behavior was exemplary,” the reporter had written.
The army spokesman described George Raad, the boy’s grandfather, as a former confidant of the Chairman who had criticized the Authority, and Hajimi as a “jailed terrorist.” The army did not give out names of soldiers at checkpoints: it was standard practice to guard the identities of soldiers involved in “incidents.” Doron had a bad feeling, though. It did not relieve him that the boy was the son of a jailed terrorist. Because he remembered the boy; he knew the boy. The story read to Doron as if the soldiers at the checkpoint had committed a crime. Hiding made him feel worse, not better. Hiding behind the wall of the army, hiding from one Palestinian woman: it was low, it was dishonorable.
Shake it off, he told himself. That’s what his father had always said when Doron hurt himself as a boy, and he had tried to respect his father’s dictum, because his father was a war hero and a good man. Almost lost a leg. Bullet through the shoulder, too. Shake it off.
“I have an appointment with Daniel Yizhar at one,” he told his mother.
“They picked Yizhar, eh?” she said. “A good choice, for them. I know the family. Did you know his father was a mathematician? And his grandfather or his great-uncle, I can’t remember which, lived in a tent and built the highways. A very clever family.”
The two of them each picked out an olive.
“I’m just going to tell him what happened,” Doron said, standing, bending down low to pick up one of the fallen lemons.
“Did anyone tell you not to, darling?” asked his mother. “Aren’t the lemons beautiful this year?”
Doron bit off the top of the lemon’s skin and began peeling it. He threw the peels off the terrace piece by piece, and sectioned the fruit. He handed his mother half, and sat back down.
“I also read in the paper that the Palestinians are saying the baby had to wait for more than an hour at the checkpoint,” she said. She broke off a lemon section and put it in her mouth.
“Is that what they’re saying?” Doron asked, looking at her squarely. Her frown was odd, tight and disapproving, he thought, until he realized it was the lemon juice.
“If you could have seen this boy, Mother,” he said. He wanted to say more, but couldn’t.
“It’s a beautiful family,” she said.
“Yeah.” He ate a lemon section. It was gratifyingly sour.
“They look very good in the pictures. The mother walking the child down the street. And that one of the boy on his grandfather’s lap, very respectable.”
“They are respectable, Mother.”
“Yes,” she said. “For Palestinians. I notice the picture of the boy’s father is just a little not so respectable. I suppose the picture must come from the IDF. It’s just you can see that he’s in a cell.”
“Oh, come on, Mother. To Palestinians, that makes him respectable. Every family has someone who’s been in an Israeli prison.”
“Don’t begin to get sentimental, sweetheart. It’s dangerous. You’re not in a good position to start feeling sentimental about the situation. Things are what they are.”
“Thanks for the information, Mother.”
“You’re welcome, dear,” she said, collecting their discarded olive pits in her cupped palm. As she bent toward him, he noticed a new line of worry between her eyebrows.
His mother cleared the table. For a minute, Doron was left to himself. He sat there looking out at the trees. The doves made their morning noise, even though the day was well under way. The smell of lemons hung in the air, a crisp smell like a clean electric desert wind. He and his mother had always eaten them; lemon eating was a shared eccentricity, even when he was a small boy. Like eating the sun, she would say. He remembered her young face puckered up in a funny kiss.
• • •
COLONEL YIZHAR and three members of his staff were waiting for Doron just within the massive main door of The Building. As Doron crossed the threshold, the three staffers seemed to jump out at him, and he took a quick step backward, nearly stumbling as he did. Yizhar remained in the background, smiling and sticking out his hand. His team looked indomitable. Doron did not feel as if they were on his side. But they were friendly. Yizhar’s assistant, a big man named Reuven, a sergeant, was known as a former bone breaker who used to work over Palestinian prisoners at the Russian Compound. He’d been the terror of al-Moscobiyyeh, as the Palestinians called the compound. Maybe desk work had softened him. Doron doubted it. Reuven was blocking the path to Yizhar and Yizhar’s outstretched hand. Reuven had dark hair and the palest skin. He smiled broadly at Doron.
Doron looked down, and his gaze fell on Reuven’s hands, which were swinging lightly as if to help the big man retain his balance. They seemed swollen and rubbery, swinging at his sides like surgical gloves inflated with water. Reuven was huge and white, an atavistic snowman. Doron looked at Reuven’s glossy knuckles and remembered the things he did not like about the army. It was nice that the knuckles were not meant for Doron’s jaw, but still.
Finally Reuven stepped aside, gracefully for a man his size, and Yizhar grabbed Doron’s hand and reeled him in.
“How are you, Lieutenant?” Yizhar’s handshake was strong, and he did not let go. Doron looked at him patiently. Yizhar’s eyes were an odd green; they looked like olives. He peered at Doron. He had the stance of an old boxer, barrel-chested and muscular, and eyes that were hooded now, but looked as if they once might have been bright, before the skin beneath the eyebrows began to sag.
“Do you mind if I call you Ari?” Yizhar asked, in a slightly too loud, slightly too articulated voice, pulling Doron over toward the elevator, keeping hold of him and putting his other arm around Doron’s shoulders. It was awkward to walk while still in his grasp.
“Do you have the feeling we’ve met before?” Yizhar asked.
“No, sir,” Doron said. What an odd question. Yizhar was not the kind of person you would forget.
“I’ve been looking at your record,” Yizhar said, then paused, watching Doron as if he were waiting for something that didn’t happen. He exhaled. “It’s impressive. I know you’re scheduled to begin another officers’ course this spring, wonderful. Your fellow officers say only the best things about you.” Yizhar fell silent. His eyes darted over Doron’s face.
Doron supposed some response was necessary.
“I’m glad they like me,” he said. He looked down at their linked hands. “Are we going to hold hands all the way to your office, sir?”
“Oh, sorry,” Yizhar said, with a half-laugh, almost throwing Doron’s hand away. God, was the boy going to be difficult?
The five men negotiated their way into a narrow elevator. As they rode up, the air was close and warm. Doron felt like a prisoner. He wondered what would happen if suddenly he could make Reuven’s uniform melt away. Fssst! He used his laser gun on Reuven’s shirt. No more sleeves, no more epaulets, no more braid! Hanging, swinging underarms, double-chinned elbows. Wrists rolled with fat. Another pull of the trigger: Fssst! Buttons pop off, shirt disintegrates. Big hairy breasts rise and fall. Fssst! Belt unbuckles. Pants, shorts drop away. Doron stopped himself. The thing was too dreadful to contemplate. He watched as Reuven clenched and unclenched his hands. He wondered what Reuven was thinking about, if you could use that word in that context. He wondered if Reuven was a good man to have as an assistant, and what he did to assist. When the door opened, the men hustled Doron down the hallway to Yizhar’s office.
The hallway was buzzing with the officers who worked on this floor of The Building, popping in and out of offices, smoking, hitching up their pants, zipping their flies as they emerged from the men’s room. Except for Yizhar, they seemed to be potbellied, with belts slung beneath their stomachs, and the buttons of their khaki shirts pulling against their ample pectorals. They hired secretaries they thought were sexy, but the secretaries were always too dumpy, too
middle-aged. Doron looked at Yizhar’s secretary as they passed through her reception area. She was filing something. Reuven stopped in front of her and put out his hand. The men did not speak with her as she handed three or four files to Reuven. Ah, she was typical, Doron thought. Her hair was a deep red and her midriff regrettably exposed—though, left to the imagination, it would improve only slightly. She was the kind of woman you didn’t want to imagine naked. She and the rest of them in The Building—all now spending their precious non-coffee-break moments going over his dossier looking for sexual perversion or drug abuse or instances of juvenile delinquency—they were the people who killed that boy, Doron told himself. It was their fault, with their long purple nails. Putting Doron on hold, forcing him to call down to fucking Tel Aviv, making him listen while that computer-generated mouse music played ragtime, and Marina Raad sat there watching him with her iron eyes, her rain-soaked hair hanging down over Ibrahim like a mermaid’s. Doron had been afraid to return her regard. He was ineffectual, she could see that, and the situation was desperate, he could see that. He remembered the end-of-the-world sound of each rasping breath the boy could not quite take.
Yizhar sat Doron down on a straight-backed metal chair in front of his desk. He smiled at Doron; he was always smiling but he didn’t seem sunny. He looked like a green-eyed owl, beaky, clever, probably ruthless. He was perched on the side of his desk, waiting. Doron waited, too. He had plenty of time; he had been taken off Shuhada checkpoint, and was waiting for a new assignment. It had been four days since what had happened happened. He had nowhere to go, except back to the Islamic Museum’s library. Yizhar looked at Doron, sitting there. Doron seemed quite calm and relaxed. Yizhar asked everyone but Reuven to leave the room. Doron looked at Yizhar and tried to imagine what it must be like to be such a stereotype of what you are, such a self-parody. Well, to Yizhar, he himself probably looked like some kind of a parody, too, a dumb young fuck-up soldier sitting there, looking a little too relaxed, given his situation. That’s probably how he looked to Yizhar, though it was far from how he felt. Zvili would be relaxed in this situation, because he had no conscience. He wondered if Yizhar intended to interview Zvili. Or if he already had. Zvili, who’d had the nerve to brush his metal detector over the mother’s body while her baby was gasping.