by Amy Wilentz
“Yah?” whispered George.
“That’s what this is about,” said Philip. “Watch.”
Ahmed began to speak. He riffled through a large loose-leaf notebook as he talked, but it was plain that he was not reading from its contents. It was a prop. A relief map of Palestine hung on the wall behind him.
“Many things have happened in the past few weeks,” Ahmed said. “I am sure you are all aware.” He looked around the table, letting his eyes meet each man’s, before going on. Ahmed motioned to a slender man standing behind him, who approached the table.
“More coffee,” Ahmed said quietly, dismissing him to his task with a small backward wave of the hand. A platter of symmetrically arranged sweets sat in the middle of the conference table. Ahmed plucked one out and took a small bite of it. He wiped his lips neatly with a napkin.
“We have seen the closing of the checkpoints.” He turned a page in his notebook, as if marking off that example.
“We have seen the arrest of scores of our young men.” He turned another page. George speculated on the actual contents of the notebook: Maps of borders described in the peace agreements? Details of the February operating costs for Orient House? Old printouts of foreign-aid disbursements?
“The Israelis have demanded that we arrest certain Hamas figures, and we have done so—some of them are still in our custody. Yet since the bombings the other day, the Israelis have abandoned the talks as if they thought the Authority were responsible,” he said. Another page.
“And finally, there has been the recent murder of a Palestinian baby,” said Ahmed, gazing mildly down the center of the table, avoiding all eyes. George stared at the notebook as Ahmed slowly turned another page. Philip kicked him under the table.
“The Israelis are not serious about peace, as we know. We’ve tried to work with them, to negotiate. We have given them everything we can give them, in order to advance the process. We have waited for them to recover from violence before. But that moment has passed.” He gave them the all-encompassing look again. The others seated around the table wagged their heads. Ahmed pulled at the ends of his keffiyeh, an addition to his wardrobe that George found irritating. Here come The Palestinian People, he thought.
“The Palestinian people will no longer tolerate inaction in the face of Israeli intransigence,” Ahmed said. George looked at him over the steeple of his long surgeon’s fingers. Ahmed was looking at him. Coffee arrived and Ahmed poured it into their tiny cups. Big men with tiny cups. Ahmed was dangerous, with his glinting eyes and his keffiyeh and his tiny sweet cup of coffee. That’s what Philip would say. George considered the concept.
“And that is why, beginning today, we are going to start—quietly and with dignity—to encourage the people to continue coming out to the checkpoints to protest the inhumane treatment of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis.” Ahmed looked around at the nodding table.
“We are encouraging the natural anger of the Palestinian people over the murder of this little boy.” Nods. “And the people are demanding that the Israelis produce the soldier who murdered Ibrahim Raad.” Ahmed closed up his notebook.
“Hajimi,” George corrected, without looking up from the table.
“Hajimi,” said Ahmed. Ahmed surveyed the table. All his councillors nodded.
They are all in it together, George thought. All except me.
“My friends, I see this is a day of rare unanimity,” Ahmed said. “Sweets?” He picked up the tray. “George?” he said, offering the platter.
George closed his eyes. He thinks he has me. He actually thinks I will go along with this, even after what I said to him the other night at Marina’s. He thinks that he can trip me up, seduce me, as usual. He’s always done it in the past. He thinks I will approve. Can he believe that?
George opened his eyes and stared at Ahmed, trying to see beyond the dancing eyes. Ahmed was serving sweets to his councillors, amusing himself by playing the obedient servant. Ah, Ahmed was having fun. He made his way around the table with the tray of sweets, serving each man. He bowed low before Salah, and the two men laughed. George tried to perceive his old friend. He stared and stared, but he had lost whole degrees of observation, his distance from Palestine had made the place inscrutable to him and now he couldn’t even read the expression on the face of his, his, his . . . George no longer knew how to categorize Ahmed: his old school chum?
Ahmed sat back down in his throne at the head of the table. George looked up and saw that he was watching him. Ahmed raised his eyebrows at George. He’s wondering, George thought. He too is off his game, not quite sure of me. George felt his hands, his own hands, trembling on his lap. He longed for a sense of mastery. He felt set up. Ahmed always won at all their games.
But. This time, Ahmed loses. This is a different time, different circumstances—a new historical moment. Or at any rate, thought George, I have a personal involvement that I cannot deny. Oh yes, he repeated to himself, oh yes, I know the old routines, the norm; I know the drill. You find something, something good, something that really sparks the people because it comes from deep down, and you pump it. Something like the torture of a prisoner, the assassination of a poet—the murder of a child. He remembered Ahmed’s lecture on manipulating the fortuitous in history: History can change a man’s standing overnight. A speech, a coup, an unforeseen incident. Pump it till it’s dry.
But Ahmed misjudged him. George was sick of letting people die for nothing, as Ibrahim had. Time was short. Ahmed was just a wrongheaded Bedouin astride a fiery stallion, recklessly leading boys to their deaths in the name of something he imagined was called victory. Come what may, George was going to make his stand against that charge. Here was his chance to defend his daughter. Probably Ahmed would trample him like dust beneath the hooves of the cavalry, but still, if he was to be mowed down in any case, why not go out with a flourish, with a bit of the old Arab glory?
Ahmed pushed his throne back and stood. George, too, pushed back his chair. Ahmed smiled at him across the table. As he rose, George caught a glimpse of the title written on the spine of Ahmed’s notebook: “Expenses for the Deputy Irrigation Coordinator, Palestinian Authority, May 1994.” Christ. He held on to the corner of the table, testing his hands along the table’s edge. He tilted his head to one side, looked at Ahmed again, carefully, took in the black-and-white keffiyeh and the level regard of the handsome eyes. Everyone was watching them. Salah had crumbs and honey on his open lips. They were all still. George held on to the table, and he remembered holding on to that bottom branch of the mulberry tree outside his house, holding on to it for dear life, while Ahmed stood before him in tennis whites, fresh from a game across the street, and told him that the Jews were winning the war and that George’s mummy and dad would have to leave, and that the Raads were going to have to lock up the house, the farm in Nazareth, his grandfather’s estate at Abu Ghosh. They would all be gone for weeks, months maybe, Ahmed had told him in a childish hectoring voice that George could still recall. They would lose their chance to play on the junior tennis team. They would have to start this school term over again when they returned, he said. Funny now how innocent they all had been about history, even the adults. Nothing happens in weeks or months.
George looked right into those same eyes that still had him fixed, as if neither of them had ever moved from that spot beneath the mulberry tree. And then shaking his gaze free, George let go of the table, tapped Philip on the shoulder, and with Philip in his wake walked out of the room and down the hallway under the dull, ugly glare of the circular fluorescent hall lights, past the young receptionist typing away beneath the smiling photograph of the Chairman, and past the two old Italianate wall fountains that had long ago run dry, over the cool checkerboard marble floors, and out the heavy iron doors into the midday sun. The others, gathered in the office at the corner of the table, watched as George’s back receded down the hallway toward the exit.
Outside, it was hot and the sky was filled with orange light. Sal
ah’s bodyguard stood chatting with the gardener. Mercedes limousines crowded the parking lot. A young man George knew approached him, holding a small basket, and from it offered him chocolates wrapped in red and gold foil to celebrate the birth of his second child. George took two and said congratulations. The birth of a second child. He stood there with his chocolates, trying to concentrate. Was it a joke of some kind? Philip was trying to bustle George out of the parking lot.
A dry wind swept through the parking lot. I am making tired gestures, George thought. Defending the honor of dead babies. He stood in the glare, unwrapping a chocolate. Yet I must do it: it is my obligation. He crumpled the golden foil in his hand. I will block their way. I will give them bloody hell. I will rescue my little boy from their old claws.
Please, Philip said. Ahmed was out on the terrace like a prince watching his guests depart. George did not see him. He put the chocolate in his mouth and let the thick, sweet taste of childhood transport him. Old school chum, farewell. He pushed his hair back from his eyes. Now, he said. We can go. They passed through the black gates.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN THE CENTRAL SQUARE OF Ramallah, the Christmas tree had finally come down. Mahmoud Sheukhi was walking back from evening prayers at the mosque two blocks away. He rarely went to the mosque but he was searching now for a bit of guidance. Sometimes after prayers he felt uplifted, but tonight, unfortunately, he hardly noticed that he had prayed. He passed the hairdressing salon and the candy store, and walked behind the stall out front where the old man sold nuts and sponges and hairbrushes and grilled corn and bread coated in salty za’tar. He dodged between cars parked up on the sidewalk, fished in his pocket, and turned the key in the outside lock of his office building. The walls of the entrance hall three floors below the office of Sheukhi & Sheukhi were covered with a film of greasy black exhaust from the wrecks that stalled and puffed all day outside on the road, waiting to get around the square. Sheukhi entered the building, carefully avoiding coming into contact with any surface.
His poor brother Adnan was dealing with that glass factory-case. So tedious. It was coming to trial in a week, and Adnan was working double time. Probably he’d be upstairs now, with his son Jibril in front of the television and Adnan trying to concentrate at his desk. The glassmakers hired Sheukhi & Sheukhi because they were a respectable local firm that was not expensive. They hired Adnan in particular because his younger brother Mahmoud was considered a smart man but something of a dreamer, and not too diligent. Mahmoud enjoyed his checkered reputation.
He vaulted up the stairs in the dusk toward the office. The hallway light was still out. He knew it irritated Adnan that his little brother had been privileged to see a crucial moment in history, whereas, of course, Adnan had not. It was Mahmoud’s topic of the week—he always had a topic. This week he’d been tormenting his older brother with the violent storm, the arrogant Israeli commander, the beautiful tragic mother, and with, of course, Mahmoud, her defender, and his jacket, his handkerchief, his umbrella, and his vitriol. Oh, it had been bothering Adnan.
Of course Adnan hadn’t been there. He was never anywhere at night except in bed or in this cursed office, working either on the glassmakers’ case or one in a series of dull battles over village land titles. That was always the way it had been between the brothers. “My Adnan, pillar of the family,” their father used to say when they were little, and Adnan would step forward solemnly to kiss a visitor. And then: “And this, this is Mahmoud. Listen to him recite poetry. Ah, Mahmoud.” Mahmoud recalled his chubby self, clambering awkwardly onto a chair, standing up proudly, his hands behind his back, and beginning his passionate recitation.
Mahmoud passed the thick little rosemary bush that sat in a clay pot on the third-floor landing, waiting for tomorrow’s sun to strike it through the skylight three stories above. The Sheukhis were village people, and every time he came to the office—usually in the evenings to watch the news—the sight of this poor solitary plant twisted some string of nostalgia in his gut. It made him think of the land behind his father’s house, the terraced olive groves, the almond trees, the rock-strewn hillside, the stone walls that wandered here and there with rosemary sprouting in great arcs from them, and the small vineyard that belonged to his neighbors, who were also his cousins. Thank God he didn’t live there anymore.
On the next floor was the office. He walked in. Adnan was behind the desk, Jibril in a metal folding chair in front of the set, his long legs sticking out halfway across the room, and another chair empty beside him waiting for Uncle Mahmoud.
“What brings you here?” Adnan asked from among his papers. It was his habitual salutation to his wayward brother. Mahmoud didn’t answer with more than an acknowledging grunt. He sat down and offered Jibril a cigarette. Jibril said yes and looked at his uncle appreciatively. Uncle and nephew began to smoke in front of the battered old black-and-white television, waiting for the news to come on. They looked alike, long legs, broad moustaches, slender, each with a dimple in his right cheek. Mahmoud was frowning, a frown of concentration that Adnan had always mistaken, since childhood, for a frown of disapproval. Jibril had made coffee and he and his uncle drank it out of thin plastic cups.
“They’re running another bunch of Bedouins off their land,” Mahmoud said, pointing at the screen with his cigarette. His frown grew deeper. Adnan came around to face the set. The scene was so predictable that Mahmoud felt it must be file footage.
“Have you noticed?” Mahmoud asked. “When they cover the Bedouins, the Israeli cameramen always focus on the sheep to make people think the Bedouins are a bunch of backward nomads, ya’ni—they want you to think that this guy has no right to live in any particular place. Humble sheepherder.” Mahmoud elbowed Jibril. “Look at those fucking sheep; stupid just like their masters: that’s what you’re supposed to think.”
He listened to the Bedouin’s complaint for a moment.
“Of course the guy is as stupid as his sheep, but still,” he went on. “No reason he should have to move from the Jerusalem suburbs down to, ya’ni, the fucking Negev.” Jibril laughed. Mahmoud stubbed out his cigarette and pulled a set of jade prayer beads from his jacket pocket. He sat there with his elbows on his thighs, the green beads hanging from one hand, his cup of coffee balanced precariously on the other knee. He thumbed his beads inattentively.
Footage of an old building in East Jerusalem came on. Orient House, the unacknowledged Jerusalem headquarters of the Authority. There had been a high-level meeting there today. Mahmoud watched George Raad leaving Orient House. The man looked old. Every life has a sad ending, Mahmoud thought. He felt a romantic sympathy for tragic old radicals.
A picture of Ibrahim Hajimi came on, big-eyed and unsmiling.
“Cute,” said Adnan.
“Yes, such a tragedy,” Mahmoud said.
Footage of the checkpoint came on, from this afternoon. It looked just like the riot before the boy died, Mahmoud thought: smoke, a lot of people running, boys throwing stones, soldiers crouching at the ready. The sight of the watchtower made Mahmoud wince.
The Israeli prime minister came on.
“Ah, His Excellency the Prime Minister,” said Mahmoud. He pointed at the television with his chin. A press conference in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, Mahmoud fiddled over the name of that soldier. Had he heard it? Had he? He thought maybe he had, when the fellow was making his calls. Right before he kicked Mahmoud out. He thought he knew the first name. Definitely.
Prime Minister walked to the podium purposefully.
“This guy,” Jibril said.
“Let’s listen,” Mahmoud said. It was always an option when an Israeli official came on, to quit listening, shut off the volume.
Bulbs flashed and the crowd of microphones attached to the podium made the Prime Minister look as if he were sprouting from behind a stand of fuzzy gray bulrushes. The television camera panned across the gathered reporters; there weren’t enough seats for them, and some were standing with their arms forced to the
ir sides, lining the walls. The Prime Minister took it all in with his heavy-lidded, vigilant eyes.
“Yes, Yoni,” the Prime Minister said, opening the press conference with customary informality.
“How is Israel going to deal with this new Palestinian campaign?” the Ha’aretz reporter asked.
“Campaign?” asked the Prime Minister. “I’m not aware of any campaign.”
“They want Israel to hand over the officer who was in charge on the night the Hajimi baby died. ‘Find the soldier.’ That’s what the crowds are shouting at the checkpoints today.”
“Please,” said the Prime Minister, coughing in a special way that signified he wanted silence, attention. The press corps grew less raucous.
“Israel spends its time rescuing members of its armed forces, not handing them over,” the Prime Minister said. “We don’t hand over soldiers to anyone, ever. Period.”
“But it’s not the enemy who’s asking for this,” said a Ma’ariv reporter. “It’s our partner at the negotiating table, Mr. Prime Minister.”
A thin whinny of appreciative laughter issued from the press corps.
The Prime Minister did not smile.
Mahmoud did not smile.
“Why won’t you allow us to interview him?” asked a loud voice in English. “What are you hiding?”
“We are not hiding anything,” the Prime Minister responded, in his almost unaccented English. Then back to Hebrew, with the Arabic voice-over translation: “The account being given by the IDF is taken from testimony provided by the commanding officer and his men. It is strictly their account that you are getting. We see no need to violate their security and their privacy by providing their names to you.” He looked down at the crowd of journalists.
“Is anything being done to protect those men from revenge, from an attack?” a voice shouted from the back of the room.
“Any one of them who is threatened is receiving protection,” the Prime Minister responded.