Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  Of course, Najjar had only written books, too, and Ahmed hadn’t been able to save Najjar’s legs. But then, he hadn’t tried as hard for Najjar as he had for George, had he?

  Ahmed downshifted. A slight hiccup in the otherwise pleasing purr of the old Mercedes, and up she went, up another rise, and up and up, and the desert spread itself before him like a vast blank terrain waiting to be conquered: it was no Sahara, but for a moment he thought he caught it shimmering. Rana was fiddling with the radio. Ahmed flicked the tail of his keffiyeh behind his shoulder, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Handsome, imperial. He wondered for the thousandth time how the Chairman managed to achieve such a disarrayed look in a garment that was so very noble, so very formal.

  Wretched, enduring bugger.

  He caught Rana watching him look at himself. He turned to her and smiled.

  “You are vain,” she said. She shook a reprimanding finger at him.

  “I’m vain because I must be very, very attractive to have someone like you sitting next to me,” he said.

  She smiled tolerantly.

  “Will you see Dr. Raad today?” she asked. She was fascinated by George, Ahmed had noticed. A man of conscience, she thought. Well, maybe he was. All the young students worshipped him, all the kids who were growing tired of the rest of the old farts—the former commandos who ran the Authority. Familiarity, et cetera. Ahmed himself still had the gloss of the guerrilla about him, but he knew that that was fading.

  “Yes, of course, of course,” Ahmed answered. “My oldest friend. I will see him every chance I get.”

  But would he? George had always taken things hard, unlike Ahmed or the Chairman, who rolled with the punches and worked with what life dealt them, which was what Palestinians had to do. You were chased, you fled. You got arrested, you escaped. You were attacked, you fought back. But you stayed what little ground you had as well as you could, unlike George who had done the one unforgivable thing, unforgivable by the fighters like Ahmed and many others in the Authority. George had left and made his life—a real, normal life—in the new world, a life that went on as if, in a certain way, nothing had happened back in 1948 when the State of Israel was created and they all ended up somewhere else.

  Ahmed was not particularly impressed by George’s career. A lifetime writing about the place, about all their issues, making a name for himself while they fought the battles, and sometimes died. Good for him, and so bloody what. What was so impressive about that? From time to time, George was useful. Otherwise, politically, he was a heart doctor from the U.S., as far as Ahmed was concerned.

  Nonetheless, Ahmed had forgiven him years ago for the abandonment. The only problem was, having left them all behind to fight the fight, George had felt—what was it?—guilt or embarrassment, and so he’d become more intransigent than all the rest of them, more radical. George was more Palestinian than the Palestinians.

  And now poor George was back again, this time right back in the thick of it. Really, if you looked at it personally, the boy’s death put him smack dab in the middle of the action, just where he’d always tried not to be—not writing about it, not pontificating, but in fact a part of it. How odd it must be for him. See? You can’t escape, Ahmed wanted to tell him. It’s in our blood, old chap. The loss of the grandson meant that George could not just sit back and comment from the depths of his father’s beaten-up, overstuffed armchair, about which Ahmed had heard so much from George back in the Amman days.

  Damn sentiment! Damn objects carried over oceans! Damn romance! This desert, these cities, these orchards and groves, these plains: this was a real place with a real struggle. Like everyone else at the funeral, Ahmed had seen that moment when George nearly stumbled into the boy’s grave. The question for Ahmed was whether George would join forces with the friend of his childhood, or turn away again. He so much wanted George beside him for this one. It would be so useful. The grandfather—and what a famous, eloquent grandfather. A truly perfect spokesman for Ahmed’s new campaign. Ahmed felt himself rubbing his hands together, mentally. What should they do with the Raad baby?

  The Hajimi baby, even more to the point. Ahmed Amr had never met Hassan Hajimi—old Authority types didn’t really mingle with Hamasniks—but Hajimi was a legend to the next generation, much as Amr himself had been a legend to his own. Hajimi was a brilliant speaker and a strategist, and all the propaganda the Israelis disseminated about him, how he was an explosives expert, a terror mastermind, blah, blah, blah, had not hurt his reputation among young Palestinians—it didn’t matter what was true or not true. Hajimi had a natural popular touch that top Hamas militants often sadly lacked, thank God, or they would be running the Authority. Some of them were as self-regarding and condescending as a pasha, Ahmed had noticed in his dealings with them.

  In spite of what the Israelis now said, Ahmed was sure Hajimi had little if anything to do with the recent bombings—but that didn’t mean the young fellow disapproved of terror or the goals of the bombers. Marina may not have married an explosives engineer, but she had hooked up with something volatile. People return to their heritage in bizarre ways. Ahmed had barely talked to the girl since she was a child, after all. Maybe Hajimi was her way back to what her father had left behind. Clearly she wanted something more authentic than what her father had on offer. If you were born in the U.S., you didn’t settle in Ramallah for nothing. With Marina, maybe it was just love. Fell in love with Hajimi, and embraced Palestine. You had to love someone or believe in something to live on the West Bank out of choice.

  “I am now the voice of reason,” Ahmed said to Rana.

  She looked at him.

  “So you say,” she said. “History is a funny thing.” She patted his knee and smiled.

  Imagine that: Ahmed Amr, the voice of reason, he thought, smiling at the windshield. And just ten years ago, he was organizing hijackings and sneaking over the Jordanian border to do raids. Hmmmm. Everything in this world was upside down. The Israelis now call me a moderate. He checked his mirrors again. What a world. The radicals blew up buses to achieve conservative, fundamentalist goals. The most traditional among his compatriots, the upstanding, the righteous—this was Raad—was on his way toward becoming an extremist, edging close to rejecting their peace because, get this, the Chairman was corrupt and because George found it distasteful to negotiate with the Israelis. Well, who else were you going to negotiate with?

  “Collaborators”—himself among them—were now the honorable men. Ahmed Amr was deep into talks with the Israelis! The evil Zionist occupier turned out to be some sweaty, dumpy guy sitting across the Formica negotiating table, eating a dried-out tuna sandwich. This was what fifty years of war had brought them to. And the logical conclusion? Here it is: Bus bombs had been used to abort the embryonic peace. Now let’s use a dead baby to revive it. The boy was dead, a martyr. His little lungs exhausted with crying, with just plain breathing. Asthmatic, as his grandfather had been. Each dusty breath came hard here in Desertland. Well, let the martyr serve the cause, as a martyr should. Come on, George! We’ll give little Ibrahim to the street. That’ll bring the Israelis back to the talks. We’ll have demonstrations, unrest, an uprising!

  Poor little chap.

  Ahmed shifted and took Rana’s hand. The Mercedes plowed onward.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE WASHING MACHINE WOULDN’T WORK. It was doing it on purpose. Slothful, temperamental, lazy machine. Marina was developing a sour relationship with it, just the way ladies did in the old days with their servants. She sat down on the floor in front of it and closed her eyes. It was made in Eastern Europe. Usually, you just had to kick it gently, slightly to the left of the door latch, and it would cough into action, those mesmerizing two-hour cycles of heating water to a boil and then laboriously spinning a hundred and eighty degrees clockwise—spinning was the American word; you couldn’t really call what a washing machine did here by the same name—hiccuping for a few seconds, and then, exhausted, rotating painfully in the
other direction until it had achieved what village girls used to achieve with an eighth of the energy, the time, the pain, and the cost only a few short years ago, before everyone had one of these unfriendly things perched on their roof in a jury-rigged shelter alongside the solar panels and the boiler, and the discarded furniture that, who knew?, might come in handy one day.

  She was washing Ibrahim’s clothes. She wanted to put them away somewhere. Maybe back in his dresser. It was a normal laundry day, and she was doing the baby’s clothes. His two blue jumpers, his blue jeans, the black sweatshirt with a Ninja Turtle on it that the wife of one of Hassan’s friends had bought for the baby in Ramallah, the thin Palestinian socks his aunts had given him that wouldn’t last two more washes. His bibs she had set aside because she couldn’t bear to wash them just yet, his bibs, and the foot pajamas that still gave off the sweet smell of the sleeping child.

  Her father came out onto the roof in his bathrobe. She looked up at him from the floor.

  “You don’t look very comfortable down there,” he said.

  “I’m contemplating technology,” Marina answered, gesturing toward the washing machine. She bit her lip.

  “Ah,” George said. “But contemplation does not seem to be leading to action in your case.” He got down on his knees slowly, and stared into the dark interior of the machine. “Not working?”

  “I kicked it, but it won’t start.”

  “Well, it’s not a donkey, sweetheart.”

  “No, really. That’s how you start it. You kick it here,” she said, and pointed to a spot where, upon closer inspection, George could see a faint indentation. He stood.

  “Did you hear me creak?” he asked her.

  “Please, Dad.”

  “No, I actually creak, like some old chair or door.”

  “Maybe you can only hear it inside of you,” she suggested.

  He cast an adversarial look at the machine and kicked it. Nothing happened.

  “See?” Marina said.

  He tried again.

  “I’m beginning to feel slightly ridiculous,” he said, looking down at her. She was surrounded by his shirts and Philip’s jeans and the general household buildup of towels and sheets. “You look like part of the laundry down there.”

  He leaned down and opened the washing machine door. He noticed Ibrahim’s things.

  “Hello,” he called into the small, dark cavity.

  He closed the door to the machine again, and kicked it softly.

  “Not quite hard enough,” she said.

  He kicked it harder. He checked the plug. It was connected.

  He looked at the machine thoughtfully, tugging on an imaginary beard.

  She laughed briefly. Her own laughter sounded harsh to her.

  “Aha,” he said, and leaned forward abruptly to push a button. A red light turned on. He kicked the machine again, and they both felt a grateful shudder as it rose to the morning’s task. He looked at her again.

  “You have to turn it on, dear,” he said.

  She looked up at him. Circles of fatigue made her dark eyes look sunken.

  “I’m tired, Dad,” she said. Behind the concave window of the washing machine, she could see Ibrahim’s blue jeans and his sweatshirt flopping from the top of the rotation down into the suds below, over and over, as if they were caught in a storm at sea. Clean was the word that repeated itself to her. She gazed down at the topography of laundry that surrounded her.

  “Come on, then,” George said, using Grandfather’s bluff military tone. “Let’s fix coffee.”

  He extended his hand to help her up, as if he could give any help.

  • • •

  SHE SAT AT THE kitchen table while he boiled water, spooned out coffee, complained about the state of her mugs. “Chipped,” he kept saying. “In the land of low-cost ceramics.” He felt the way he did sometimes—rarely, he liked to think—when he gave a lecture and the audience wasn’t really following, as if there were a vast emptiness out there, an echoing amphitheater filled with no one, a void that he was trying to impress and amuse, as if a mere human could impress the void. She was looking at the backs of her hands.

  “I’m getting old,” she said, interrupting his flow.

  “Everything’s relative,” he said, putting her coffee down in front of her, and looking at her hands also. “They’re beautiful. A bit like your mother’s, strong and square, but with my long fingers.”

  “Vanity, vanity,” she said. She looked up at him, and he thought he detected a brief passing of amusement in her gaze. He hoped.

  “I can reach much more than an octave, dear.” He smiled at her above the steam from his mug, and sat down across from her. “So you’re going to see Hassan’s lawyer today?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Is Philip still asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “After his great exertions,” she said.

  “He did acquit himself admirably, didn’t he?” George said, nodding. Philip was born to be a funeral director, George remembered thinking. Or a politician.

  “He said something about coming with me to Orient House, after,” George said. “There’s another meeting.”

  There was a silence.

  “Hassan says those meetings are like publicity stunts,” Marina said.

  “He does, does he?” said George. It was rare that he was offered even the smallest glimpse of the man. “He’s not far wrong, I must say. Except that publicity stunts have to be amusing or at least interesting.”

  There was another pause in the conversation. They both felt it. This was the moment when they would naturally have turned to Ibrahim and let his presence undo the silence between them. But now they were both busy not talking about Ibrahim. Marina stood and turned off the kitchen light. She went to the window, and pushed out the metal shutters that she used for blocking the early morning sun, which got in her eyes in winter in that kitchen no matter where she sat. She looked at her father.

  It was odd to have him here. She had finally admitted to herself that he was the reason she had decided to study at Bir Zeit, decided to get to know the Homeland. George sipped his coffee and looked at the headlines in Al-Quds, which was lying on the breakfast table. Her mother had been resigned and stubbornly unromantic about Palestine, but her father was quite the opposite. Marina had ended up in Ramallah, she thought, because of all her father had taught her. Her father would call her into his study in the evening, when she imagined he was reading medical treatises, and show her the key, the old key to the Raad family house in Jerusalem, the house he was now so reluctant to visit, and tell her stories from her great-grandfather’s day, about men on horseback with swords held aloft, and about the wounds of the fabled fighter Ibrahim Abu Dayyeh, who fled in his pajamas from the hospital in order to continue his defense of the neighborhoods of Jerusalem in 1948 up until the last minute.

  “What do you say, shall we flee tomorrow?” That was what George told her were her grandfather’s sarcastic words every evening before the family went to bed.

  It was a way of thinking about the world: in her father’s heart, the Raads were refugees, exiles, and outsiders, no matter how American Marina might have felt growing up, with her mood rings and her prowess at Monopoly and her comfortable way of life. At the house in Cambridge, news items from the Middle East were like letters from family in the old country, discussed and dissected at the breakfast table and then at the dinner table—every day, all day. The Chairman and Uncle Ahmed had been her adolescent heroes, and she’d made The Cause, as her father would say, her whole life, in a way. She studied Palestinian history at Harvard; she had her master’s degree in Middle Eastern political science when she arrived at Bir Zeit. (Of course, her father never took her master’s seriously; he was the one who had lived through the Catastrophe. He was the one who was born in Palestine, and of course he was also the world’s acknowledged authority on the subject.) Marrying Hassan was a way of gaining authenticity, she realized a long time after she f
ell in love with him—and having Ibrahim, too, who was a Palestinian born in Palestine.

  “The editors of Al-Quds seem to think they’ll find this soldier,” George said. He folded the paper and looked over at her.

  “And they are all-knowing,” she said. Each time she thought about the soldier, she saw his scared face, heard the panic in his voice as things got worse.

  “Will you need to see a doctor while you’re here?” Marina asked George.

  He noticed that she had changed the subject.

  “It depends how long I stay,” he said.

  “You mean you want to know how long you are invited for?” she asked, managing to smile. She didn’t want him to leave, she realized. The house was already too empty.

  “I can really only stay a week, I think,” he said. He straightened his back, and tightened his robe. “I’m not feeling entirely well. It would be nice to get home.” Home, he heard himself say. He’d always taught her that this was home.

  Marina looked out the window. Of course he wouldn’t allow her to extend an invitation. He had to be in charge. It was good to know that she could so easily summon the energy to be annoyed at him; it was a sign that some part of her was still intact.

  He was glad to see it, too, that impatient turning away. Maybe disgust would help pull her out of her torpor and depression—if he simply continued to behave like an insensitive father. And it came so naturally to him. But possibly, he thought, it was time to take matters in hand. Possibly, he thought, now was the moment for him to do something for Marina, protect his only child from the situation, The Cause—too late, he knew, but there was still a defense to be mounted. He had taught her to love Palestine; in some way, he had inflicted this terrible trial on her, and it was his obligation to help her now. He didn’t want her caught up in some futile and dangerous retribution against this soldier, whoever he was. But what could George do? What could he do? Without Ibrahim, she was even more alone. It would be like Marina, with her sense of loyalty, to stay in Ramallah just to be near the husband’s prison. And was Hassan interested in personal revenge? George wondered.