Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  “Ari? This is Sergeant Reuven, my assistant,” Yizhar said, with a sweep of his hand. Over in the corner with the plants and the file cabinet, Reuven looked up. He nodded slowly at Doron, who saluted from his chair.

  Yizhar surveyed the room. Doron thought: He’s surveying the room. Yizhar looked at the door. Now he’s going to lock the door, Doron thought. Yizhar slid off his desk and went to lock his office door. He leaned out into the reception area first, and said “No calls” to his secretary. Lord help me, thought Doron. Yizhar returned to his perch.

  “You could be in deep-shit trouble, kid, do you know that?” Yizhar asked.

  “I’m aware there’s a problem, yes, sir.”

  “You know who that child was, the other day?”

  “Yes, sir, I am aware of the baby’s family, if that’s what you mean. I know who they are. When they came into the guardroom, I didn’t know.”

  Yizhar picked up a glass cup filled with coffee. It had been sitting on his desk when they arrived: old milk had settled on the top and was beginning to crust. With both hands, Yizhar held the cup up in front of his face and looked at its contents with a practiced, scientific eye. He shrugged once, and sipped at it. He swallowed. He nodded to himself, and put the cup back down, a little farther away from him than it had been.

  “It was because of who he was that the baby was delayed. They knew at headquarters,” Doron said.

  “What?” Yizhar said.

  “They knew,” Doron said. “Someone told me expressly that I was not to allow the Hajimis to enter.”

  “Someone? Please. Who?” Yizhar sniffed.

  “A guy I talked to on the phone at headquarters,” Doron said.

  “At that hour it may have been the janitor for all you know. Could have been the Defense Minister’s driver. What was this person’s name?” Yizhar gingerly fingered a tiny tape machine.

  “I didn’t ask,” said Doron. He felt like a fool. “I wrote down the number somewhere.” He fumbled at his pockets—of course he didn’t have it now; no jacket. He must have left it at his mother’s.

  Yizhar ignored the fumbling as if it were just simply too pathetic a ruse. He fiddled with his tape machine.

  “Neat little item, isn’t it?” Yizhar said to Doron, looking over at him as he set the thing down at the edge of his desk. Doron noticed that the desk on which the impossibly small, impossibly thin, brilliantly black recorder sat was rusting. Rusting. God, the army and its priorities.

  “Right, Ari. We’ll look into that call, okay? If you find the number, great,” he said. “Let us know.”

  Doron thought he detected a hint of sarcasm in Yizhar’s voice.

  “Right now,” Yizhar went on, “I’d like to sit here and tell you just what happened from the time you first became aware that Marina Hajimi and her son were trying to cross into Israel until the ambulance arrived.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yes?” Yizhar said.

  “You’re going to tell me?” said Doron. “I thought this was an investigation.”

  “Yes, yes,” Yizhar said. “Let me explain. For the next few weeks, until this dies down? I am you and you are me. I mean, right now, you are the Israeli army, and obviously so am I, and I’m just going to take over for you here for a while, so you can relax and calm down, and let me do the heavy steering. Got it?”

  “But you want to hear what happened, don’t you?”

  “Look, if you tell me what happened, it’s only going to be what you believe happened, am I right? No one knows everything. You don’t. The kid’s mother doesn’t. The other men don’t. I don’t want to get turned around here, with too many versions. I’ve heard a couple of witnesses, and that’s enough. They told me what I need to know, and now, I’m just going to put everything together. And that will be it.”

  “Huh,” said Doron. He looked at Yizhar with a new respect, and fear.

  “Yes.” Yizhar smiled. “It’s easy. I’ve done it before. In the end, it will be our word against theirs, or against hers. It’s not like it’s going to end up in a court of law. It’s p.r., not justice.”

  “But there were other Palestinians there.”

  “As I said, our word against theirs. Sheukhi, you must mean.”

  “Sheukhi? I don’t know. Some guy in a tie who was butting in and trying to help her. In his way.”

  “Yeah. That would be Sheukhi. The lawyer. Lawyer who talks a lot.”

  “A lawyer?” said Doron. “Oh, no.”

  Yizhar got up off his desk and went around behind it to his chair. He sat down, and looked fondly at his tape recorder.

  “Don’t worry,” said Yizhar. “Sheukhi may be a lawyer, but he’s a Palestinian lawyer. We’ve checked him out already. Not a great reputation, even among Palestinians. Not worth worrying about, for us. The testimony of an Israeli garbageman would carry more weight.”

  Doron looked down at the floor.

  “So tell me what happened,” Doron said softly, addressing the linoleum.

  “I was recovering from the earlier unrest at the checkpoint,” Yizhar said. “There was a storm. A woman and her child sought entry into the trailer. I could see the child was ill, so I took them in out of the rain. The boy did not look as if he was in need of attention when I first saw them. The woman gave me the boy’s medical documents, which I examined and found in order. In normal circumstances, I would have passed them through right away. But given the closure, I decided to run her through the computer. I discovered her husband was in jail, and so I took the name and ran it past a few of my superiors. I called, they checked her out, I explained the child’s predicament, and some fifteen minutes after she arrived at the trailer, an ambulance was on its way to pick them up. Unfortunately, it arrived a few moments too late.” He looked over at Doron, who was still looking down.

  “What do you think?” Yizhar asked with a note of pride, but with some gentleness, too. “Good, no? Not inaccurate.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Doron said. “She was there too, you know. She knows how long it took. She knows that the ambulance was actually ordered for one of my men, she knows what calls got made, what the answers were.”

  “She is the wife of a jailed terrorist, Lieutenant.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So. What do you think of our story?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say: ‘Very good, sir.’ ”

  “But I . . .”

  “Say it, Lieutenant. I know you can. You’re a smart boy.”

  “The boy died, sir.”

  “I know that,” Yizhar said, suddenly not flippant.

  “She lost her baby.”

  “Yes, she did. And now he’s gone,” Yizhar said. Am I going to have to spell out everything? he wondered. “And there’s nothing we can do about that. Too bad, we would all like to bring him back. But we’re dealing with what’s possible here. We want to save what we can out of the wreckage. Pull out the survivors. You want to be one of the survivors, don’t you? The Israeli army is one of the survivors. We are not all going to go down with that—baby, as you call him. He was two and a half, by the way.”

  “Right,” said Doron.

  “Not a baby, is all I’m saying.”

  Doron finally looked up from the floor at Yizhar, who was watching with fascination as Reuven groomed himself. The big man gently inserted the tip of a paper clip beneath a nail, pulled it from one end to the other, then lifted it and flicked its burden across the room in the general direction of a stack of Jane’s Defence Weekly magazines that was sitting in the corner in the shadows of Yizhar’s coatrack.

  “It’s a crucial distinction.” Yizhar put out his arms over the back of his chair. “Babies—babies are innocent. Can’t talk. Big-eyed nobodies. Little boys are sweet, too, but they are real people. Identifiably somebody. Have personalities. Will obviously become members of their families, resemble their families already. If you see what I mean. The boy looked just like his grandfather, for exampl
e. I don’t want to be cynical, but in people’s minds, little boys can be future explosives experts, future jailed terrorists, future suicide bombers. Babies, it’s harder to imagine. But I’m sure that somewhere out there is a photograph of little Hassan Hajimi, Hamas deputy for political information or whatever the fuck, in short pants, sitting on his grandfather’s lap or holding his mother’s hand.”

  Yizhar sat forward.

  “Maybe we should find that picture,” he said, turning to Reuven. “It must exist. Get it out to the media. Just to make a psychological point.”

  Reuven grunted, nodded. Wrote something down in a small notebook that he eased out of his back pocket.

  Yizhar took up a pen from his desk and began playing with it, flicking the tip in and out, clicking it, opening it, squeezing its spring, putting it back together, reclosing it. He picked up a notepad and applied the pen to it, then thought better of the impulse, and put the paper back down again. He looked up at Doron and smiled. Doron assumed Yizhar must like that small smile, must think it looked good on him. There was a long silence. No clicking. Reuven stopped picking at his cuticles. Yizhar stopped smiling.

  “What do you make of the mother?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Doron asked.

  “I mean, how do you assess her character: Is she strong, determined, intelligent? Or maybe she is meek, defenseless, shy? What do you think she’s like?”

  “Well, remembering that the time I spent with her was maybe an hour and that her son was dying on her lap, I guess I’d say she is very tough, strong-willed. Angry. Vengeful now, probably.”

  “All Arabs are vengeful,” Yizhar said. He was throwing it out, to see how the boy would react.

  “Oh,” said Doron.

  Yizhar looked at the soldier. “Oh” was not your typical army response to such an observation.

  Doron caught the look. “Well, her boy did die at an Israeli checkpoint,” he said. “She might think she has a reason to be vengeful.”

  “The mother has no right to feel vengeful,” Yizhar replied, sharply. “Maybe she’s to blame, ever think of that? Maybe she should have gotten him to the checkpoint earlier, maybe she should have figured out a way to have her famous daddy find her a good place in Ramallah, a good enough doctor on her side of the line. She had other possibilities.”

  “I’ve considered that,” Doron said.

  “Good.”

  “I’m sure she has, too,” Doron said.

  “Possibly. But possibly not. After all, Ari, the Authority has pointed out a very convenient scapegoat for her. . . . And you seem pretty eager for the job. . . .”

  Reuven coughed. Yizhar looked over at him. Reuven pointed to his watch. Yizhar looked up at the clock. Maybe that was Reuven’s role as an assistant, Doron thought. Telling time.

  “Listen, Lieutenant,” Yizhar said. “In any situation, any incident, anyone could be to blame; it all depends on your point of view, that’s what I say. I just want you to be aware of the story we’re giving to the press. I’m sure it’s close to yours, with a few minor emendations from the interviews we’ve had with the other men who were there. What we’ve said is this: Mrs. Hajimi waited a quarter of an hour. The child was not showing signs of distress before the ambulance was called. Procedure was followed to the letter. The boy’s death is unfortunate, but there was nothing more the men at the checkpoint could have done. That’s all we’ve said for now.”

  Doron looked at him. “And my phone calls? Getting put on hold? The orders I was given?”

  “Extraneous. All that comes under following procedure to the letter. We don’t need to say more than that.”

  “And when she and her father and her husband and this lawyer all tell the reporters that your story is not true, that we held them for much longer, what will you do?” Doron looked at Yizhar.

  “I’ll look the reporters in the eye,” said Yizhar, “and tell them that we stand by our men, and by their version of events. Basically, I’ll say that it’s a case of an Israeli lieutenant’s word against the word of a terrorist’s wife.”

  “I wonder who they’ll believe.”

  “That’s up to them, Ari. But we will provide transcripts of interviews with the men, a tape of the IDF’s call for the ambulance you requested, and a report by the emergency medical team about the boy’s condition when they arrived at the scene.”

  “He was nearly dead.”

  “That’s one thing that their report says, but medical personnel are professionally trained to observe more about a decedent than you can, Lieutenant. How close he was to dead, what he eventually died of. How long it might have taken him to die, to be blunt. If saving him was ever a possibility. That kind of thing.”

  “Ah,” said Doron.

  “Ah” was also not a typical soldier’s response, but Yizhar ignored it. He had no doubt that the boy was getting the message, but did not want to give in without a battle. It was all about Doron’s ideas of truth and morality, and Yizhar was sure he could rein him in by showing him how much he would have to sacrifice to uphold his so-called standards, if he happened to be so inclined.

  Yizhar considered Doron again. The lieutenant still looked a little too confident in his metal chair, with his long legs sprawled out and his feet resting on the heels, not with the soles planted on the floor, as they would be in someone showing proper awe.

  “And the final and most important thing,” Yizhar went on, in a deeper, more gravelly tone, “something that I cannot stress enough, is that you and the other men who were at the checkpoint are absolutely forbidden to speak to any member of the media, foreign or domestic, or to anyone else about any aspect of the incident. Anyone who is found to have spoken with the media or with any third party who ends up talking to the press—and that includes your mother, and your girlfriends, and your second cousin’s cousin, Lieutenant—will face a court martial. Mere suspicion of the same will mean immediate suspension. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m not about to start running amok.”

  Yizhar slammed his fist down on the desk and all his little toys jumped. Doron flinched, the noise was so crackingly loud. Didn’t the man give a thought to his tape recorder?

  “I don’t really care what the fuck you think you’re about to do, Lieutenant. I just want you to do what I say. I hope that’s clear. You’re one piece of this puzzle, one piece.”

  It was, to Doron, uncanny how quickly Yizhar got himself back under control, as if—and it was only too possible—hitting the desk had been part of an elaborate act. He’s West Bank security, Doron reminded himself. This is an interrogation.

  “I just want to be sure you understand,” Yizhar said. “Any violation of these proscriptions could lead to something really bad, something worse than what has already happened. I want to be very clear about this. It’s not only to uphold Israel’s integrity. It’s also for your own protection and security, do you realize?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe I understand,” Doron said.

  “You don’t want them to know your name, believe me.” Yizhar looked him in the eye. “Or your address. Do you think she knows your name, by the way?”

  “She could, sir. I’ve thought about that. She could. So could the lawyer.”

  He was a smart boy, Yizhar thought. Good mind. Yizhar believed that Doron would not self-destruct. But you could never be a hundred percent sure. Yizhar stood, adjusted his belt and his crotch, and then walked over and unlocked the door.

  “Oh, and Lieutenant? There’s one thing more I want to be sure you understand,” Yizhar said. “No matter how we end up spinning this story, guilt is not a useful emotion. The only mistake you made, really, was going by the book, right? You could have let them through on your own responsibility, but you didn’t. You’re a soldier. You wanted an okay from your higher-ups. Fair enough; that’s what we teach the average man, and that’s what the average man does. The average man gets put on hold. The average man ends up in a predicament.

  “Sometimes, you h
ave to assess the value of disobedience. Disobedience can be useful in the army. All of our heroes have disobeyed at one time or another, sometimes with heroic results. But you say you had to ask headquarters for approval. You had to ask them, didn’t you? You waited too long, didn’t you? With the boy dying in front of you, you didn’t even consider disobeying.”

  “I did consider it, sir,” Doron said. “But, yes, it was too late.” He remembered himself saying Sorry, sorry. He remembered Zvili’s hopping-mad face, the angry exchange, the ambulance staff rushing up, and turning to look at the boy again, and the child had just, just, collapsed, and lay there limp in his mother’s arms. Marina looked up at Doron. Her eyes seemed to beg. For what? Doron remembered his rush of nausea. He felt it again, beneath his heart.

  There was a long silence. Yizhar did not look at him. Doron felt fear welling up inside him, a physical thing, at the bottom of his stomach. He hadn’t felt so scared since the boy started turning blue. Maybe Yizhar was not on his side at all. Maybe he had a fallback position: blame everything on Doron.

  “Will that be all, sir?” Doron asked.

  “For now.” Yizhar thought he detected a shaking in Doron’s voice, maybe. He hoped so. Got to make him quake in his boots, that’s the way to keep a man in line. Yizhar came back to his desk and looked down, sorting through some meaningless papers as a sign of dismissal.