Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  “That would be the commanding officer, I assume,” another reporter asked.

  “Yes,” said the Prime Minister.

  “Can you believe this shit?” asked Jibril after a few minutes. He looked over at his uncle. Mahmoud did not respond.

  Adnan sat down at his desk and began going through recent letters and documents about the glass factory. It was difficult to concentrate over the sound of the Prime Minister’s nasal voice.

  “Find the soldier? Find the soldier?” said Mahmoud. “Great. But will anyone have the guts to really go after him? Oh, I doubt it.” Adnan looked up. The Prime Minister was shaking his head, looking fierce, his spectacles nearly tumbling from his nose. The announcer was talking about a rally in Ramallah that was to be held in two days to protest the fate of the Hajimi boy and other baby martyrs.

  “You can help them find the soldier, Mahmoud,” Adnan said after listening for a moment. “You’ve met the fellow, after all.” He gave a brief laugh, and returned to his work.

  “Meeting is not finding,” Mahmoud said. “Wish I knew the guy’s name.”

  “Moshe, Schlomo, Yitzhak,” said Jibril.

  “Avram, Chaim, Pinhas,” suggested Adnan.

  Mahmoud did not laugh with them. “I think it’s Ari,” he said.

  They both looked at him with wide-open eyes.

  “That’s something,” said Adnan. “I mean it’s half of the puzzle. It’s a beginning.”

  “I’ve tried to remember,” Mahmoud said. “Did I ever hear his name? It was not a very calm situation, ya’ni. . . . But I think I did hear it. She must have heard it, too. Really, it’s hard to remember anything except her face, and a lot of phone calls and radioing, people running around. Amazing.” He twiddled his beads. “There was so much movement and still, nothing getting done. I should have just taken them across. What worse could have happened?”

  “They would have shot you, brother,” said Adnan.

  “Then I would have died honorably,” said Mahmoud.

  He lit another cigarette and considered the Prime Minister, who was wiping his glasses.

  “Instead of living dishonorably,” Adnan said, smiling into his papers.

  “Don’t tease me, habibi, I am not in the mood,” Mahmoud said. “What are you working on there, anyway?” He looked over at his brother’s desk.

  “The glass factory.”

  “The glass factory,” said Mahmoud. His eyes clouded. A merest hint of apology passed over his face. It had been a long while since he’d pored over a brief or shown his face in court. He tried again to recall the soldier’s name, but only the name of the factory owner would come to him. He turned his eyes to the press conference. The Prime Minister was on his way out. The man was wearing a very loud necktie.

  “Glassblowers. A dull case,” Mahmoud said, turning to Jibril, who smiled at his uncle from his slouch on the folding chair.

  Mahmoud was remembering that the last time he’d been over to the courthouse, filing some paper in this very long glassblowing case, he had run into Ruby Horowitz, again. She liked him, he could tell. She was a hip-swinger who wore a waist-length bum-freezer leather jacket. She wore tight skirts and moved her hips in a twitchy way that made him jump inside. Her boyfriend was a soldier who had been assigned as security to the courthouse, so she was often around when the boyfriend was busy elsewhere in the compound. She’d come over after work; she was a low-level secretary for some low-level bureaucrat in Defense. She said it was an okay job. Mahmoud thought about it. He would bet that she had unimagined access to information.

  He wondered about Jewish women. When they were at all friendly, they seemed so forward, so ready for it. Ruby spoke some Arabic. That was a kick: her parents were from Morocco. She told Mahmoud that she used her Arabic on the job, and then she sat back, looking proud. He laid a heavy hand on Ruby’s knee and said things to her in Arabic the gist of which he was sure she could understand. The question crossed his mind, as it was bound to cross a mind like his: was she a Pal-symp, or did she just like Arab men? Fine line between the two, Mahmoud, fine line. She was enjoying the idea that he was taboo. Oh, Ruby.

  “Well, I’m off,” Mahmoud said. “Anything you need me for, Adnan? Any papers you need me to take to the courthouse?”

  Adnan looked around the office, shuffled some papers around his desk. Ritual.

  “No, I don’t think so. Nothing immediate, anyway,” Adnan said.

  He would go to that rally for the baby martyrs, Mahmoud thought. He wanted to see Marina Hajimi again and take a look at her father. He figured they would probably be there.

  Mahmoud tossed his coffee cup across the room into the trash can, pocketed his beads, shrugged on his coat, and folded up the chair he’d been sitting on. He rested it against the wall beside the closet. Adnan and Jibril followed him through the outer office to the door.

  “Don’t stay out late,” Adnan said, as he shut the door behind Mahmoud. It was his little joke. Mahmoud always stayed out late. Adnan heard a low laugh as his brother descended the stairs.

  It must have rained during the news. The street was wet and shining like a mirror under the dim buzzing streetlamps. Mahmoud slipped behind the old man’s stall, which had been covered in burlap and was pulled up close to the building for the night. Zabaneh’s grocery store was shut tight. He walked past the neighborhood mosque and the entrance to the tea shop, a famous old place. Through the foggy window, he saw old men’s heads bent over their tea, and a table full of young fathers sitting on reed stools, playing cards. The sweet smell of tobacco burning in a nargileh tempted him for a moment. But he was neither old nor a father, and had other business on his mind. He went on in the cold wind.

  Heavy gold for weddings sparkled out from the windows of a jewelry shop. It was a long way home, down through the center of town first, and then up a long steep hill and over its crest to the family’s concrete house, in a refugee camp that had after fifty years become a permanent part of what could be called greater Ramallah. Mahmoud ran down a flight of stairs between two buildings and came out at the big intersection where a toy store and a pizza parlor faced a sweet shop and a dusty old hardware store. Outside the crowded pizza parlor stood a group of foreigners, waiting to get in, shivering. He trudged past them with his head down against the wind. They were speaking Dutch? Finnish? Norwegian? The toy shop was brightly lit. All the gay pink little bicycles had been strung up from the ceiling until morning, when the shop owner would stack them against each other again, out on the sidewalk. Faded plastic shrink-wrapped Uzis and realistic pistols were laid out in the window. A tower of yellow Legos had been built by some ingenious employee and little plastic soldiers stood at the ready in its windows and on its ramparts. Three blond dolls with vacant blue eyes sat next to a pair of neon-colored walkie-talkies. Lieutenant Doron, here. Circles of caps for boys’ guns spread themselves in a geometric pattern at the dolls’ feet. Inflated swimming rings were piled in a corner one upon the other like a totem pole. Mahmoud caught a glimpse of Mickey Mouse. Inane face. Ari Doron.

  That was the name, Mahmoud didn’t doubt it for a second once it came hurtling back into his mind. He looked down at the ground as he walked, and the black street shone up at him. It was a common Israeli name, and it was the soldier’s name.

  Doron, Doron. What to do with him. Where to go. How did you take a name like that and find the soldier? There were places to go with information like this. Yes. Definitely. He could think of a few. Hajimi’s cell at al-Moscobiyyeh, if only you could get in. The Chairman’s office. Or simply to Raad. Raad. He’d think about it. Tonight, he would not stay out late. Tonight, he would fix himself some tea, and lie down on his bed, and decide.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE RAIN CAME PELTING DOWN like an assault. It would stop for ten minutes, then start again with renewed vehemence. Tonight, it seemed almost personal to Doron. The wind whipped around the stone houses on Kakal Street and made the tops of the pine trees dance. Doron shivered; his shirt wa
s soaked with rain. He’d looked for his blue-jean jacket but he couldn’t find it, so now he was cold, and the empty cigarette pack with the military phone number he’d called in Tel Aviv was missing. He was sure the pack was in the jacket pocket. He opened the door to his mother’s old jalopy, an ancient boat that had once been a taxi, and climbed in. His mother never used it, but she loved to brag about how inexpensive it had been. They both had a set of keys. Doron thought he could find the way up to Zvili’s, even though he’d been there only once before. He needed to know what Zvili had told Yizhar.

  Find the soldier. Now that they were out looking for him, he knew he would never feel the same blankness. They had selected him. It was as if they were acknowledging his role. The writing on the walls was about him—a night in his life, an incident, witnesses. He felt an eerie solidarity with whoever had scrawled those words.

  It was an amazing sensation, like being hit dead-on in the chest with a mallet. He was a target. He felt the concentric circles narrowing; he was looking down into them, he was being sucked down into a grim nowhere. It brought him starkly back to himself, Ari Doron, a man who was born in Jerusalem, who was an Israeli, who had picked strawberries, camped by the Kinneret, shined his father’s shoes, who had been in charge that night. The soldier.

  The windshield wipers were on, making their own odd rhythm, and there was static on the obsolete radio, punctuated by blaring bits of incomprehensible voice and music. Something was always wrong with the car, it suffered from negligence, and tonight of course it would be the windshield wipers. They were on, but not working properly. The streetlights made a smear across the windshield. Doron could barely see. He hunched forward, peering out through the small double crescents that the wipers managed to clear. His world was filled with blackness. No one would think of going out in Jerusalem on a night like this. Only the monumental, immovable beggar woman who never left her corner on King George. He caught a glimpse of her, crouching with all her blankets under the pale light of a bus shelter at the Ben Yehuda intersection, looking like a shadowy hillock. The only good thing about the rain was that it kept the Palestinians at home. Today for the first time since Find the Soldier began, there had been no protests at the checkpoints. But that just meant that the rioting would be worse the day after tomorrow, when they were planning to hold a rally in Ramallah to mark the death of what they called the baby martyr.

  Doron was feeling guilty. Here came his military side: he didn’t like feeling guilty. Shake it off! Guilt was like a side of meat hanging around your shoulders, some repulsive thing about you that everyone could see. It was not permitted. Not here in his hometown. This was the place of no regrets, no apologies. No one does wrong here. You do what you have to do for your country—that was Doron’s ethic, what he’d been raised on, in school, in the army. His father, a stalwart old soldier, preached this credo. His mother was different, but she too believed.

  Do what you have to do. Doron thought about it. It was so seductive. And with all his penance, with all his guilt, he did recognize in himself an unmistakable panting desire for self-preservation, not learned but organic. Live with it. Shake it off. Like Yizhar, Doron was a simple soldier. Find the soldier; he thought: That’s me! Ready or not.

  He wondered what would happen. Maybe by now, while Doron sat shivering behind the wheel of the jalopy, maybe by now Marina had already given his name to Hajimi. Maybe by now, the whole terrorist network was gathering its forces to find him, get him, deal with him. He doubted it: it was hard to imagine himself as that important. For a simple soldier, it was not easy to be frightened of something until it was actually holding a gun to your head. Doron believed—no, he knew, now—that Ibrahim’s death had been an accident, an inevitability that Ibrahim and Doron and everyone else involved had somehow stumbled into. It was difficult for him to imagine that anyone could see it—seriously—any other way. That was the line he was feeding himself today.

  But what if he were the boy’s father, cut off, in prison, his wife alone and undefended on the outside, the Israelis his eternal enemy and the boy his only child?

  And then there was always the Palestinians’ paranoia to take into consideration. For them, no accident was accidental.

  As Doron drove up HaNevi’im Street, the skies cleared momentarily, and in patches of moonlight and cloud, the low houses of Musrara with their red roofs appeared and then disappeared. He turned left onto Highway 1. The Dome of the Rock was on his right, its shining cap bursting out of the Old City into the sporadic moonlight. Doron drove up toward Ramallah. Before the Jericho turnoff, the rains began again. He turned right onto the Jericho road, and then left again, off Jericho, toward Pisgat Ze’ev, the Jerusalem suburb where Zvili lived. Zvili had invited him many times and finally he’d had to say yes. Doron remembered that afternoon barbecue. He’d tripped over his own feet in the little backyard, and spilled his beer on the new Mrs. Zvili. Pink dress. She was a good sport.

  The road curved up and around a precipice, and Doron passed the darkened fronts of the dry cleaners, the Co-op supermarket, the pizza shop, the SuperPharm, the hardware store, the health insurance office, all along the main drag, until he looped off into the residential area, where the houses were built like little castles, with crenellated turrets and bits of balustrade made of concrete and stucco and brick, and terra-cotta tiles. From the edge of the short cliffs on which the suburb had been erected, you could see down into the West Bank, into the winking Arab villages, with their minarets and domes and flat roofs that shone tonight like patches of a silver quilt whenever the rain let up. During the day, if it was clear, you could see the Dead Sea’s salty oblong through Zvili’s picture window, evaporating along the Jordanian border.

  Zvili and his wife lived in one of Pisgat Ze’ev’s tight little castles. Next to his place, a new house was going up, and Zvili complained a lot about the Palestinian workers who were building it. Most of the lights were out in Zvili’s neighborhood now. It was almost ten, but Doron was in no mood to be polite. He honked his horn. He honked again, and some lights went on, but not at Zvili’s. Finally, Zvili came to the door. He turned on an outside light—the short brick path up to the house sprang out of the dark. He stood in the lit doorway, a small wizardly figure in white underwear and a streaming white bathrobe.

  “Who is it?” Zvili yelled through the storm, shading his eyes from the rain as if he were looking at the sun.

  “Me,” shouted Doron. It was hard to hear above the hammering of the rain.

  “Ah, you,” Zvili shouted. “Come in. What’s wrong?”

  “No, you get in the car,” Doron yelled.

  “Into that car?” Zvili shouted back. “With a madman at the wheel? No way.” He lifted the shoulders of his bathrobe up over his head and ran over to Doron’s car. “What’s up, Ar?” he asked, peering into the window.

  “Just get in,” said Doron. “We have to talk.”

  “Actually, we do,” said Zvili. He ran back to the house and shouted some words into the doorway, picked something up, and dashed back to Doron’s car, letting himself in to the passenger seat after a brief tussle with the car’s door handle. He was wet.

  “You should kiss me,” Zvili said, as he sat down.

  “What?” said Doron, looking at Zvili as if perhaps he hadn’t heard right. “That’s not what I had in mind, really.” He started up the car again. It coughed before turning over.

  “Kiss me. I’m gonna be a father,” Zvili said, turning to Doron with a wide, lecherous grin. He lit a cigarette, and shifted his gun around on the elastic holster belt he had snapped around his waist.

  “Alana’s pregnant?”

  “You think it would be someone else? Yeah, she’s pregnant. We found out today.” Zvili let his bathrobe fall open wide, and he played with the hair on his thighs.

  Doron drove.

  “Aren’t you going to say congratulations?” Zvili asked. There was a note of hurt in his voice.

  “Oh, congratulations, of course.” Doron t
urned to him briefly and smiled. “That’s great.” These days, everyone wanted him to give the appropriate answer.

  “You planning to have kids?” Zvili asked.

  “Yeah. I guess. Maybe someday.” More appropriate answers. Doron hunched over the steering wheel.

  “Where are we going?” Zvili asked.

  “Nowhere,” said Doron.

  “Nice night to go nowhere.”

  “You want to go somewhere? Where?”

  “Actually, home to my wife,” said Zvili. “We were just, you know, getting into it, if you must know, when you started blowing that fucking horn. Shit, man, what’s wrong with you? Arriving unannounced at ten at night. What’s up?”

  “I’m a little stressed out.”

  “So who isn’t in Jerusalem?”

  Doron gave a short laugh.

  “You’re freaked about the Hajimi kid.” Zvili tapped a cigarette on the dashboard.

  “Right.”

  “You see they’re going to have a rally for him? Those people are crazy. It’s going to be wild.”

  “Yeah. Sounds like fun.”

  “Hey, Ari, lighten up. Yizhar has it all worked out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” Zvili said. “When’s the last time you talked to him?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “He’s got it covered.”

  “Oh, good,” said Doron.

  “Come on. Yizhar’s our savior, Ari. Remember that.”

  “He’s not telling the truth.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It’s going to blow up in our faces.”

  “Not in my face, buddy. And not in yours, I hope. He won’t let it.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Doron. “If people find out the story is not true, we’re the ones who’ll catch the flak for it, not Yizhar. The only one he’ll stand by is whoever it was who told us not to let them through.”

  “You mean, whoever told you,” Zvili corrected him.