Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  Reuven stood up. Yizhar nodded at him.

  “Lieutenant Doron can see his own way out, Sergeant,” Yizhar said.

  • • •

  REUVEN LEFT FOR the day. Yizhar was alone, which was how he liked it. The boy was a smart boy, and he would come around, because this was his country and he was army. You could rely on that, almost invariably. You could count on all those feelings inculcated through years of schooling and training, you could count on the entire fucking patriotic spirit of the country. It was a comfort finally to know you could fall back on the culture, except in the case of an extreme personality—which did not describe Doron. The culture would bring Doron safe to harbor, and there would be Yizhar, waving and saluting from the dock. He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his poor old desk. He could see a blue dusk beginning to fall over the powerful shoulders and wings of the Generali lion. Thick gray clouds were piling up down at the end of Jaffa Road. Whenever he turned his attention to it, he could hear the sporadic noise of the traffic stopping and going at the light beneath his window. If he listened hard, he could hear the sound of the pedestrians’ shoes falling as they crossed the four-way crosswalk below. Where were they all going, so busily?

  This was where he’d ended up. It wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself, but it wasn’t bad either. He was suited to investigation. He would have preferred defense, but that was not to be. That was not to be—funny phrase, “not to be,” a phrase full of destiny and fate, but always used in hindsight. Sometimes he agreed with the Torah-kissing nuts: the ways of the Lord were mysterious to man. If you looked at Doron, or at Gertler, for that matter, you’d have to agree. Of course, when the religious talked about mysteries they were not necessarily interested in an individual man’s curriculum vitae, but Yizhar was.

  Yizhar remembered the facts of Gertler’s case with the kind of painful clarity that only youth and war inspire. Shimon said a man is only worth his courage, and Shimon was blindly brave. The end came during the Six-Day War, a heroic time for Israel, not like now. Gertler—the hero, a man who joked while missiles rained down—panicked. Too many people were dying. His boys, the enemy’s boys. Gertler couldn’t handle the responsibility. That was his flaw: too much compassion.

  Yizhar was sure that that, and drink, had unmanned Gertler. Compassion—or its simulacrum—was a useful thing if you were trying to run the human beast. But, lesson one, Lieutenant Doron: It is not a good thing if you let it take you over. Especially in a war, when you needed to do as much damage as possible. In war, even a little bit of feeling was already too much if it was wasted on the other guy. Understand the other guy, okay, but feel only for yourself, Yizhar thought. Yizhar held to this in peacetime, too. In Israel, peacetime was wartime.

  Dusk fell suddenly into night. The spotlight went on across the street, and the lion leaped into relief against the sky. With bombs going off in nearby neighborhoods, Yizhar had watched Gertler, in command, sit with trembling hands in front of a shortwave radio for ten long minutes, incapable of action—when what the nation needed was one final assault, and that, fucking quick and fucking huge. There was Shimon, who was supposed to give such orders, sitting dumbstruck and immobile—a man who normally never stopped moving, never stopped talking. He had been drinking, too. Yizhar picked up the photograph again and studied it. The smiling face. That was before everything happened.

  Yizhar drank up the cold dregs of his Nescafé, and remembered the three empty glasses on Shimon’s desk that afternoon, glinting in the sun. The man drank whiskey the way sand soaks up water. He absorbed it. The other officers were running around madly, trying to cover over Gertler’s failure and keep things moving, but Yizhar felt as if he and Shimon were in a small empty space, alone, at two in the afternoon with the sunlight streaming in and the enemy’s automatic fire bouncing off the building. Yizhar saw the empty bottle of Scotch in the garbage can, tossed there and lying at a gay angle as if this were a midnight bachelor’s party instead of command central in the middle of the day in the middle of a war. Shimon looked where Yizhar was looking and then smiled ruefully up at him from behind the radio. He shrugged and raised his hands as if to say, Why not? and then he slumped. Shimon had failed the nation, and the army, at a time of crisis.

  It was a great national tragedy and Yizhar was sorry for his friend, somewhat sorry. At the time, Yizhar thought that this was certainly the end for Gertler, that this unforgivable binge and breakdown would destroy him. After the war Gertler would be quietly and gently relieved of duties, Yizhar was sure. Yizhar could hope now for a brighter future for himself. He was next in line.

  This was when Yizhar’s spinning avocation started. The chief of staff begged him to come up with a plausible public explanation for Gertler’s collapse. Yizhar didn’t want to do it, he wanted to let it lie, let the public remember Gertler’s failure and interpret it on their own, but the chief of staff insisted, and so Yizhar complied. Because Gertler was Israel.

  “Exhaustion” was how he had described Gertler’s condition at the end of the short war.

  “He’s suffering from exhaustion,” Yizhar had told the assembled microphones and cameras and tape recorders. The reporters looked at him quizzically. “Exhaustion” was a word for Judy Garland or Elvis Presley. It was the first time Israelis had ever considered the possibility that an Israeli could be tired or worn out—and it saved Gertler’s name.

  Back then, Yizhar was hopeful. He still didn’t understand. He loved Shimon, after a fashion, but Shimon was weak and Shimon . . . well, Yizhar thought Shimon could do other things. Shimon could become head of Hebrew University, Yizhar thought. That was Yizhar’s plan for Shimon, a nice, safe, comfortable seat. Leather, tweed, tobacco, and enough respect, while Yizhar would go on to lead the Israeli Defense Forces. But instead, unbelievably, the “exhausted” Gertler was decorated and promoted and history marched on, carrying Gertler on its shoulders to higher and higher rank and position, even though everyone in the army and almost everyone in the government and almost everyone in the country, when you came down to it, knew that the man had fallen apart in the face of battle, if not exactly why.

  This gave Yizhar early insight into how history—at least in this country—was written. Certain fates you could not change. Gertler was destined for posterity, no matter how much Scotch he poured into himself.

  Another star for you, General Shimon! And Gertler, shuffling and inarticulate, is escorted from the command room once again, in the endless tape of Yizhar’s memory, and while others pursue the war to its inevitable triumphant finale, Gertler sits in a chair near a window, his blond hair brushed by wind from the fields, in seclusion with his fiancée, under guard in a breezy farmhouse far from any action. The army could do things with its own back then that it couldn’t do today. Today, sequestration was out of the question.

  But what if it was for the good of the nation? No, it was impossible. An idle daydream.

  Doron’s file lay open on the edge of Yizhar’s desk. There were other options.

  In this job, you had to be creative.

  • • •

  DORON HAD TAKEN the two tabloids from his mother’s house. He sat down at Moment Cafe on Aza Street and opened Yediot to the photo spread. The open paper covered the whole tiny table.

  And there they were. He looked at them, trying to absorb some meaning from their faces. How had they ended up with him? And more to the point, how had he ended up with them? Marina and the boy were holding hands and walking toward the camera on the main street in downtown Ramallah. You could see a stand that sold walking sticks to their left and a jeweler’s to their right. The boy was toddling; must have been taken within the year. And by whom? The father, perhaps, in between incarcerations.

  A small picture of the father at the bottom; clearly the work of an Israeli Defense Forces photographer, with the cell’s sink visible in a corner of the shot. Hajimi looked furtive and downcast, as if he were trying vainly to avert his eyes, hoping to avoid entirely the
humiliation of being photographed by some army hack, for the prison record.

  Raad with the boy on his lap. Never were there two more serious faces. Doron looked and looked. He had stolen this boy from this man. He looked at the grandfather’s hand resting lightly on the boy’s leg and thought: They will come after me.

  Why shouldn’t they?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AHMED AMR WAS DRIVING IN over the desert from Jericho. In the passenger seat, Rana slipped off her shoes and tucked her legs under her. The days in Jericho had been slow, filled with legislative business that went nowhere, full of wrangling with the Chairman by telephone in Gaza, where the poor man was stuck as usual—hooray! The meeting in Jerusalem today would be something else entirely. No Chairman, no legislative procedure, no Robert’s Rules of fucking Order. Just Ahmed Amr at the helm, in the big chair, and the rest of the cabinet, meeting in semisecret, and, as honored guest, George Raad. Friend of my childhood, Amr thought. That’s what George had called him and that’s what he was. Uncle Ahmed, to Marina. This time, the invitation was not just pro forma. This time, Ahmed needed George—if the Authority could get him on board, the next stage would really go smoothly. George could work a crowd. But he was so touchy and recalcitrant. Oh, we’ll see, we’ll see, Ahmed thought.

  He loved the ride through the bald hills down into Jerusalem, especially today, with Rana next to him. Sometimes he pictured himself as Bedouin royalty, a camel-riding princeling in heavy, costly robes, surging in over the dry mountains to the holy city, with a vast army accompanying him, and wives, servants, and a whole entire city following behind to support him and supply his every need. The heroic fantasy was left over from youth, but it still struck him now and then, when he was alone in the car and driving a decent distance. Of course today he was not wearing robes—he would only put on his abayeh at home when no visitors were expected, or to meet his closest Palestinian friends in private quarters. Today he was wearing a suit and tie, and a keffiyeh. He and the Chairman were the only ones in the cabinet who wore the keffiyeh, but the Chairman wore it for extenuating reasons—to hide his utter, complete, and absolute baldness. Amr wore it for effect. A Frenchwoman in Beirut had once said to him, when he was wearing it: “Ah, tu fais si arabe.” She thought it was romantic, and his eyes had been opened. Rana, on the other hand, was not impressed. He looked over at her. She had her hand out the window and was letting the wind blow back her hair.

  Nowadays, he liked to present Western observers with what they thought was the conundrum of the keffiyeh and the suit and tie. The ensemble confused and intrigued them, and Amr enjoyed that. He liked wearing the keffiyeh and sitting behind a desk in an office with a cell phone and a laptop, and reading about himself afterward in the Western press. How they fell for it! The advanced Arab, the chief negotiator in his head rag, calling Washington via satellite. They never failed to mention the phone, the fax, the keffiyeh. In reality, of course, thousands of keffiyeh-wearing Arabs, including Palestinians, worked at desks or in offices or factories or on cranes and bulldozers or in other areas of the modern, technological world. What else was left for them to do in their ancient headgear? Nothing authentic, to speak of. The keffiyeh was vestigial. The Palestinians’ land had been stolen from them, and there was little of it left to work in the old traditional ways, with a keffiyeh to shield you from the sun, a flock of sheep, a long Biblical beard, and a walking stick. Who wanted sheep, anyway?

  Amr liked being an Arab in a Mercedes with a beautiful girl by his side. It was part of his grand fuck-you to the world. He was one of very few council members who had bought his own car with his own money and who drove it himself. I alone have integrity, he said to himself. He loved the feel of the car. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t a limo, it didn’t have smoked or bulletproof windows. In fact, it was old. But it was heavy, and powerful, and it handled well. It churned up the desert dust as well as any new car could. The stick itself had a thick, heavy, leather-covered richness in his grasp. The car smelled like leather and saddle soap. Why give a driver or bodyguard these pleasures, when he could have them for himself? Amr was the captain of his car. Besides, he hated the dreadful intimacy of drivers and other personal attendants. Following you around from place to place, waiting outside like a signpost for all the world to read, that you were there. Driving you from spot to spot. A driver always knew where you were, who you were avoiding, where you could be reached. He always knew who you were fucking.

  It was still bizarre to be back in Palestine in broad daylight with all the proper documentation. Amr had come back after the beginnings of the peace talks to take his expected place at the Chairman’s side, but still, he was always looking over his shoulder, waiting to be handcuffed, beaten, brought in. Watching for a tail. Waiting for hitmen from the Mossad, or maybe here, it would be considered internal—the Shabak. It was impossible to forget the famished months in the Israeli-run camp in Lebanon, the long terrifying, exhilarating years leading raids from Jordan into Israel, the weeks and months in solitary at Moscobiyyeh. Now Amr had a car with special Authority plates, accredited to him by the Israeli government.

  He kept the two front windows down as the car thrust higher into the desert’s peaks and the tropical dampness of the Jericho plain evaporated. The open windows made an attack easier, but only marginally. The breeze, the sandy smell: it was worth the risk. He checked his mirrors. No tail, no one, nothing. The hills looked like the beaten backs of Bedouin donkeys. A tuft of brush here, a dusty tumbleweed blown up against a rocky outcrop, but otherwise dry dirt, and packed solid. Nothing alive, or growing, or about to grow. Nothing his weary, cosmopolitan eyes could see, anyway.

  He switched on Kol Israel, the Israeli news.

  “No, put on music,” Rana said.

  He laughed and shook his head.

  Blah, blah, the chief of security, the Defense Minister, blah, blah, security is a priority, cannot negotiate with terrorists, without security there can be no peace, blah, blah. Then the Israeli leftists: Talks must continue, blah, without peace there can be no security, the Prime Minister is corrupt, blah, blah. When they were yowling among themselves, the Israelis were like cats. You could never tell if they were fighting or fucking. Then the Palestinian response: Whine, whine, the closure is unjust. People are without medicine, blah, blah, a baby has died, victim of inhumane Israeli policy, the talks cannot continue, how can we negotiate with these people, whine, whine, and on and on.

  “So boring,” Rana said. “How can you stand it?”

  “I love it,” he said.

  “I know.” She shook her head. “Crazy.”

  This was a low-rent desert. It was hard to imagine an Arab army descending dramatically down one of these scrubby, dirty mounds, although they had, they had. Everything that remained in the possession of the Palestinians was low-rent, low-budget, and this of course was not even theirs, not anymore, not for the moment.

  A flock of sheep was wobbling over a rise. These were tended by a scrawny yipping dog and a young Bedouin wearing a rag tied around his head against the sun and a sweatshirt that had a university escutcheon on it, Amr could not make out which. Of course it was mid-morning, and the boy was not in school, much less at university. What did all his sheep eat? There seemed to be nothing for anyone in this place.

  Poor George. The most brilliant man in the world. Our voice in the West—or in America anyway, which counted for something. The most amusing man, to Ahmed—but now, not amusing. George had not looked at all well at the funeral, and he seemed not himself at the Hajimis’, afterward. Frail, although still capable of summoning the patriarchal glare. The man was sick. Dah! Amr thought to himself, using George’s favorite exclamation. Amr had heard from one of Salah’s deputies that Raad was not well, but he had not heard any prognosis. Something with the heart, he said. Amr wondered. He would miss George if George died: it was an old bond they had and one that somehow could not be broken by distance. Whenever something important happened to Ahmed, he always found himself wa
nting to call George. Lately, he didn’t.

  Ahmed still remembered that hot, hot day from so long ago that seemed, in memory, the beginning of their long association. They were neighbors and schoolmates. He remembered running down to George’s—only a few blocks away—to tell him that the Amrs were packing up their things, what little they could take with them, and eight-year-old George standing there in his short formal pants and jacket, in the violent sunlight after school let out, guarding the front of the Raads’ house, his legs planted as though he could never be moved from that one spot, his long fingers nervously pulling on the leaves at the end of a low branch of the mulberry tree, saying: “I’m not leaving. I’m supposed to be on the junior tennis team this summer. Aren’t you?” The tennis team. Ahmed wondered if George remembered that. Or was he too caught up in The Cause? And then of course George turning up at the Amrs’ in Amman for supper one evening a few weeks later, looking proud but embarrassed, with the rest of his family. He remembered how George had come to him in the hallway after sweets, and said: “Father says now we are poor.”

  The threats that had been made against George—after he wrote that ridiculous book—had been troubling Ahmed’s usually serene conscience, now that George was around. He kept saying to himself—as he had for months, since the threats had come to nothing (thank God!)—that it wasn’t his responsibility. He had warned George, he reminded himself, he had done what was right, and then—even better—nothing had happened. Nothing! But he wondered whether George held him and the Chairman responsible for the threat. Oh well, Ahmed thought, in the end fate had been on George’s side, that time, in spite of all the information—and it was good, hard information—that Ahmed had got. After all, George had only written a book—and it wasn’t an entirely bad book, Ahmed recalled, although George’s criticisms of the Chairman’s conduct and the Authority’s corruption were a little outlandish. Yes, George had only written a book.