Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  He heard an electronic beep coming from somewhere just outside the house—the roof, was it?

  “What’s that?” he asked Marina.

  “Oh,” she said. “The washing machine. It’s changing cycles, or so it claims.”

  • • •

  MARINA WENT TO find the ironing board, which she hadn’t seen in months. She found it folded up behind the armoire in the hallway. A few pushes and shoves dislodged it, and she carried it to the laundry room and set it up. This was how she was going to spend the rest of her life: washing, sorting, ironing, and folding. Philip’s collar wouldn’t stay down. She sprayed it. She sprayed blue jeans and tee shirts and underwear. Her iron made everything flat. She did Ibrahim’s little shirts and even his socks. Flat, and flatter. It was a relief to watch the wrinkles disappear beneath the iron. Heat was passing over everything. The heavy iron sank into the folds of her father’s blue shirt like an ocean liner, flattening the waves as it moved. It was a beautiful, magic eradication. She looked forward to ironing an infinity of cotton sheets.

  • • •

  LATER, ON HIS WAY from the kitchen to find Philip, George passed Marina in the hallway. She was holding Ibrahim’s neatly folded clothes ahead of her on her flat palms like some Oriental offering. George stopped her by putting a hand on her shoulder. He kissed her cheek and then looked at her closely. The hallway was dark. Half open on either side of them were closets overflowing with stacked linens wafting a fresh smell into the air. At the far end of the hall, a door to a bathroom where the shower had just been turned off was open, and a fog of steam swept down toward them. The carpeting was soft underfoot. George felt inappropriately uplifted, as if he were walking beneath a bower with a young girl on a spring night near the sea. Marina shook herself free as he inspected her face, and fled down the stairs to the baby’s room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TO VENTURE INTO ENEMY TERRITORY, that was how Doron thought of it at first. He located the Hajimi house through police records at the Russian Compound, where Hassan Hajimi was imprisoned. It was like a research project: First, Raad’s books at the library. Then some treatises on Islam, and books of Muhammad’s sayings. Now this. As he flipped through the long document—which listed former as well as current prisoners—Doron began to wonder who all these political prisoners were. The sergeant on duty watched him with folded arms. Doron was in civilian clothes: black jeans, a white tee shirt.

  “Here it is,” Doron said to the sergeant, because the man seemed to require communication. Doron jotted the address down on a matchbook. He nodded at the sergeant, whose eyes flickered over Doron’s face. He raised two skeptical eyebrows and quickly came over and took the heavy notebook from Doron.

  Doron walked down through Musrara and across King David to the Old City. Enemy territory, he thought. Man with a mission. He was looking for a new wardrobe. He wound his way to Jaffa Gate and the souk, and began descending the main thoroughfare. He tried not to look out of place, but he felt huge and awkward and surrounded. He zigzagged through the crowds down to the bottom of the tourist market, past stalls selling tee shirts, chess sets, ceramics, candles and candelabras, round leather ottomans, silver jewelry, and gilt-sheathed daggers, and then turned left and headed toward Damascus Gate and the real market, where they sold things people needed. The place was crowded; Doron was certain he was the only Israeli here—if you were Israeli, you stayed well within the Jewish Quarter in the Old City unless you were looking for a fight.

  He passed through the food market. Imploring wide-socketed skulls of butchered animals hung at waist height. Goats and cattle, possibly sheep, Doron couldn’t tell. Behind the exotic aromas of cumin and coriander from the spice market, you could smell death. The broad stones of the alley were slick and black with water and bloody runoff from the butcher stalls. Women with shopping baskets and bags engaged in a cacophony of negotiation with the stall keepers. Bright oranges and lemons lit up the dark alleyways.

  He turned down a narrow roofed alleyway and emerged from a world of skinned chickens into aisles piled with pants, stacked with scarves, festooned with hanging dresses, leggings, and children’s clothes. Eager faces looked out at him from the stalls. It was less crowded here.

  If he spoke Hebrew—no, he didn’t even want to think about that. But if he spoke Arabic, his accent would give him away, he was sure. So, English—maybe they would not be able to detect his accent in a foreign language.

  “Pants,” he said to a smiling man.

  “Pants?” the man asked.

  Doron pointed at the stack.

  “Ah, trousers,” the man said.

  “Yes, for me,” Doron said, pointing to his legs. The man showed him a pair of black polyester pants with a sharp crease down the front.

  “You like?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Doron said. He was assembling his disguise. He felt the excitement of adventure. Dress-up.

  The man started wrapping the folded pants, and looked sideways up at Doron. Doron caught the look, and understood: Why was this foreigner buying these things? It didn’t make sense.

  Should he get a keffiyeh? They were hanging from a rack a few stalls down. Too obvious, he thought. And not everyone wears them. And could he ever figure out how to wrap one? Never. He settled on a scarf, a long woolen one. Palestinian men tied them around their necks with the two ends hanging down in front. Guaranteed to look authentic, Doron thought, as he put the scarf in his little black plastic bag along with the pants. Now a close-fitting knitted hat and a sweater-vest, and I’m ready.

  He took everything back to his mother’s empty house, and changed quickly, shoving his real clothes into the back of a closet. He didn’t want to think too much about what he was doing. This would be normal, he thought, if I were doing it for the army, for some undercover unit, for some good reason. The greatest generals always had some story of dressing up like women and assassinating terrorists in distant Arab cities. But for him, there was no good reason. He was doing this simply because he felt compelled. He needed to know more; so far, he could explain nothing to himself. Not the boy’s death, not the mother’s strange allure, not his own involvement. If he got closer, maybe he’d see things more clearly.

  And maybe not. But he had to try. He wanted more than anything to see Marina Raad again. He wondered: Was this normal? In any way? He turned her over in his mind. The black hair, the way it curled in the rain, and her frightened face, which she tried so hard to keep distant and haughty.

  When he looked in the mirror, he thought he’d done a pretty good job. He wondered if Palestinians had a different way of walking; he thought so. Israelis moved aggressively; the Palestinians were more cautious. He would try a cautious walk, then, and keep himself as invisible as possible. He pulled his hat down low over his forehead, put one hand in his pocket, and fitted the other with a cigarette. He looked at himself again, and a Palestinian looked back.

  • • •

  FROM THE STREET, you could barely see the house. It was perched on a hill overlooking the Ramallah road, and only its roof was visible from the street that was listed as its mailing address. Fig trees grew in the garden. Their dark green tops rattled up against the roof in the sandy winter wind. There was a rusting red tricycle sitting in a corner of the rooftop. Some old, dusty, machine-made prayer rugs had been scattered here and there. In front of one section that had been covered with makeshift tin, a clothesline ran. Flowered sheets whipped along it. The flapping sheets waved him away, warned him off. The day was dark and the sky was an ochre color that signaled that the hamsin was coming again.

  Doron hated the desert wind: it coated cars with a film of yellow sand, it got up your nose, it made you cough, and worst of all, it reminded you that Jerusalem, with its McDonald’s and Burger Kings and nice red buses and nice red post offices and its green gardens and flowering terraces and public buildings flanked by fountains, was actually right on the edge of an ancient desert where camels and cactuses and Bedouins were the only successf
ul species.

  He saw that there was no door from the house onto this street. He left his unhappy taxi driver waiting and went around the corner. He hoped no one would see him; they would probably be able to spot him as an impostor right away. Down the hill was the Ramallah road, always busy, its intersections and lanes filled with potential and actual car crashes. Across from the house was a big empty lot. Bits of paper trash skittered along its broken ground, and piles of construction materials—tiles, cement blocks, bags of sand—stood in heaps waiting for the day, long distant, no doubt, when someone would manage to scrape up the money to build something here and also get around to doing it. Facing the Hajimis’ driveway was a big green overflowing garbage dumpster. Doron decided he would stand just a little behind it and wait for Marina to come out.

  He pulled his wool hat down a bit further around his head. He put the collar of his shirt up against the wind, pulled his sweater-vest tighter, and double-wrapped his long wool scarf, letting its tails hang down at the sides of his neck. He lit a cigarette. Now he looked like someone he would normally avoid. He move farther behind the dumpster, so that he could just see around it. Certainly she would come out. A Muslim mother was not allowed a long mourning period, especially if her son had died a martyr. Not that Doron imagined that Marina Raad was a particularly devout Muslim.

  Doron hadn’t learned much about Islam in his few short days in the library, but he had dipped into a few handbooks in Hebrew and English. First of all, Muhammad (“Peace Be Upon Him,” as they said in the books) was always on horseback, which seemed oddly heroic to Doron, who imagined his own prophets as outcasts with mud-caked hair, ranting on street corners, or elderly men with long beards and shepherds’ crooks—their transportation at its best an old jackass. The Prophet of Allah (Peace Be Upon Him) rode horses and pitched tents and dug trenches for battle, working with shovels and pickaxes. He was like an Israeli pioneer. He made miracles in which rocks turned to sand and a girl’s apronful of dates was made to feed hundreds of trench diggers. He caused lightning to flash from beneath the blow of his pickax. He claimed Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus as early prophets of Islam. Like so many of these fellows who purveyed the word of God, Muhammad (PBUH—they abbreviated it in the books) seemed to have had a quirky mind, with opinions on everything. “Do not wear silk,” he is supposed to have told Muslim men. The sexual proscriptions and advice were particularly interesting: according to another book, the Prophet said, “A man is not allowed to have a woman and her paternal aunt as two wives simultaneously, nor a woman and her maternal aunt.” Probably the translations were not great, Doron thought.

  In any case, you could certainly find equally silly precepts in Judaism. Do not wear blends of linen and wool. Why? And the other day, Doron had heard that an important rabbi in Jerusalem—some jerk with an Old Testament name who wore a high hat and a rich cape encrusted with gold and jewels—had advised religious men not to walk between two women, just as it is written that a man should not walk between two donkeys or two camels, for fear of becoming like them. And that same rabbi declared—no doubt after giving it a lot of thought—that it was permissible for an Orthodox man to pick his nose on the Sabbath, but Alka-Seltzer was off-limits because it fizzed. Doron could never take religion seriously.

  Doron stood there and inhaled the dust and fumes from the Ramallah road, along with his own cigarette smoke. There were things no Israeli did. No Israeli went to Ramallah: it was enemy territory, a place where they wanted to kill you, like certain places in the Old City. The Authority was in charge in Ramallah. If an Israeli walked down the street in Ramallah, these days, he’d get knifed, people said. But there was no avoiding it for Doron—this little wasteland in Ramallah, his post at the dumpster. He was afraid that Marina might see him—that if she did, she would recognize him, and after that, who knew what might happen. And there was some little, contrary, dangerous feeling in him, too: he hoped maybe she would see him.

  Two men were walking down the hill, talking. Doron tried to look relaxed as they approached. They squinted at him, and he thought, What if they speak to me? He drew on his cigarette in what he hoped was a Palestinian way, and kicked at the dirt, looking down, waiting for them to go on. They stopped. He didn’t look up. He heard the sound of a lighter being flicked, an exchange of words. He kept his eyes on the ground. The men stood for a moment more, then continued on. Doron lifted his eyes after they passed, and watched them recede down the hill. He tossed his cigarette and tucked himself behind the dumpster.

  The whole neighborhood used the dumpster, and a bad smell spilled out of it—old canned fish, dirty diapers. He closed his eyes, and the scene at the checkpoint came back to him. He saw himself at the communications controls. He remembered Zvili’s angry face and the boy’s scared blue eyes. At the bottom of the hill, a car screeched, glass shattered, and there was distant heated shouting. Closer to Doron, a man’s voice said goodbye. In English. A door opened.

  Doron peered around the dumpster. Marina was coming out of the garden gate, walking toward the street with the young man Doron had seen at the funeral with her father. Her face was half hidden by a silk scarf and sunglasses. The two of them stood there, silent, staring across the street at the dumpster and the empty lot, and for a moment, Doron thought they had seen him. He pulled his head back a few centimeters. The young man looked at his watch, and then checked the street. He shook his head. Marina stood stiffly apart. She leaned lightly against the wall of the garden. An askadinia tree brushed its thick pointed leaves against her shoulder.

  They waited. Doron waited with them. He was beginning to feel imprisoned by the vigil when finally their taxi arrived and they set off. Doron hurried up the hill and around the corner to his waiting cab and jumped in. He watched Marina’s taxi as it plunged and bucked through the traffic on the Ramallah road.

  At the side of the street, small children walked with their mothers to the market. At every intersection, young men were waiting to be picked up by jitneys and driven across the checkpoint to the Israeli side of Jerusalem for day work. Today they would wait in vain—the closure was still in force—but they were eternally desperate and eternally hopeful. Through the small crack in his cab’s curtains, Doron saw a fresh graffito on the walls that were bouncing past. Then he saw it again. He tried to sound it out in his iffy Arabic each time he passed it, translating as he went along. He saw it again. Ah, an “s” sound. He heard himself hissing, “Ssssss, ssssssss.” And then he realized what it said. FIND THE SOLDIER. Find the soldier. Soldier, he recognized the whole word, now. It was a word he had learned in training, a long time ago. The CD disk that his driver had hung with a red ribbon from the rearview mirror jumped up and down to the rhythm of the traffic like some kind of measuring device, a meter of impending disaster. Specks of light flicked off it. Doron had always assumed that the disks must be symbolic in some way for Muslims, like the rounded-off crescents that topped so many mosques and minarets. Endless frittering useless thoughts crackled across his brain. He sat back. His stomach bounced. He let himself relax into the car’s worn vinyl upholstery. His taxi followed the same rocking trajectory as Marina’s. Find the soldier. Like a child’s game.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GEORGE COULD FEEL EVERYONE LOOKING at him when he entered the meeting room at Orient House. He used to enjoy being the center of attention when he came to these gatherings, but not anymore and not under these circumstances. Were they looking at him in a new light because of Ibrahim? Philip stayed close, but offered no real protection against the onslaught. He had come to Jerusalem this morning with Marina to see Hassan’s lawyer and met George just outside Orient House. Ahmed boomed up to George with his big, healthy body. You hardly noticed the dozen or so other men, Ahmed was so imposing.

  “George,” he said, embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks and then taking his hand—actually grabbing it as it hung at George’s side, lifting it up and taking it. George looked down at his hand. He looked up at Ahmed.

&n
bsp; “Come,” Ahmed said, dropping George’s hand. How like Ahmed not to mention Ibrahim, here, to understand instinctively what was called for and, more to the point, what was not. George was uncharacteristically eager to belong, not to feel the wrenching alienation he’d been overwhelmed by since his last visit. Look at Ahmed: Here was the man who had stood by him in spite of their differences. George tried to convince himself that here, he was protected.

  “Thank you,” George whispered to him as they made their way across the room to the conference table. He held Ahmed’s strong, sinewy arm. It had been decades since they leaned against each other in this familiar way, not considering politics and the oceans that divided them. Possibly, George thought, this is the meaning of home. There was something about the warmth of Ahmed’s greeting that made George believe he had come around to George’s way of thinking—that Ibrahim was no longer to be used as part of the Authority’s negotiating arsenal.

  “Sit,” said Ahmed, pulling out a high-backed chair at the table for George. He laid a proprietary hand on George’s shoulder after he was seated. He looked at the others, who were talking, smoking, and nodding in small groups around the room.

  “Let’s begin,” Ahmed said. He sat down at the head of the table, his knee touching George’s. George looked around the table.

  Philip leaned over to George and whispered, “I don’t like it.”

  Philip must be feeling something I’m not, George thought. Something I should get that I’m not getting. Am I being used, trapped?

  “They’re up to something,” Philip said. “Don’t you feel it?”

  Up to no good, Grandfather would say.

  Again, Philip leaned and spoke into George’s ear. “ ‘Find the soldier,’ ” he said. They had commented on the recurring graffiti as they rode in from Ramallah.