Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  Sheukhi began to laugh.

  “You know what, Raad?” he said, sticking his face right up into George’s. “You don’t scare me. You’ve just confirmed something for me; before I wasn’t sure if you were a coward, even though you abandoned the struggle. But now, I know. Goodbye, Doctor.”

  George wanted to hit the man, but instead, he turned away, and Sheukhi sauntered out.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MARINA PUSHED THE CART THROUGH the narrow aisles. First you had to navigate around the island of nuts and chocolates and pink and blue marshmallows near the entrance. It was odd buying for men only: meat and coffee, pita, the occasional cake. Her father loved lamb, she bought lamb. Meat for men. Not like before: chocolate treats and breakfast cereals, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, sliced white bread, diapers. Or before that, when she shopped for herself and Hassan: chicken and rice, onions, Diet Coke, and Turkish delight, a repulsive sweet he loved. There wasn’t much in the cart today, but she was finished. It seemed sad and empty, diminished. She stopped at the counter where Ibrahim liked to pick out a lollipop. If she made a hundred men happy, it would never satisfy her as much as one single smile of Ibrahim’s—looking up at her with a lollipop stuck in his mouth, his cheeks hollow with sucking, the lips curled up at the sides with a grin like the drunken one that had come when he finally noticed for the first time who was nursing him, only two years earlier. The edges of the mouth smiling while the rest was occupied with something else. It was a devastating look he used to have, and she tried to face it squarely now, as she pictured him sitting in the pull-back section of the carriage, kicking his legs through the holes, sucking on his red lolly.

  Adel was behind the counter. Marina put her stuff next to the register for him to tally. He gave her a rueful smile. She gave one back.

  “How is your husband?” he asked.

  “He is fine, thank God,” she said. You always had to mention God.

  “The Lord be praised,” Adel answered. He turned over her package of meat. “This lamb is not so fresh.”

  “Oh,” said Marina. “That’s okay. I can cook it forever. It will soften, the Lord willing.”

  “Let me see if we have something newer in the back,” said Adel, and he was gone.

  On the radio that morning, they’d been talking about unrest at the crossings. People kept flooding to the roadblocks to demand that the Israelis hand over the soldier. Marina never wanted to go near a checkpoint again, and she wouldn’t, except to cross over to visit Hassan. The night before, during the Prime Minister’s press conference, they had shown boys throwing stones and Israeli soldiers shooting, as usual. And she saw it. The small white trailer at the Ramallah checkpoint. It looked just the same as ever, as if nothing of note had ever happened there. The soldiers outside it could have been her soldiers. That’s how she thought of them now: hers.

  Adel came back with a better piece of meat, and she paid him and carried her father’s lamb out of the store in a plastic bag. Next to the popsicle freezer beyond the doors, four or five folded strollers were piled up against the wall.

  As Marina walked up the hill to her house, she read the graffiti scrawled along the wall. FIND THE SOLDIER. It was scribbled again in poorly executed script on the green dumpster in the dusty lot across from her house. She wondered where her soldier was now, right now. What he was thinking.

  A car festooned with rippling white ribbons and pink balloons was coming down the hill. As it passed by, its hot exhaust brushed her and she caught a glimpse of a bride’s rouged downcast face. It was her wedding day, the day of photographs, the groom on horseback on a hill in the park, and the bride primly standing in front of an arch with her hands at the sides of her big white dress. Marina had seen it all a hundred times, she knew it all by now. The customs of her homeland. Hassan looking like a prince in his white wedding suit. She remembered Hassan from the photos more than from the event itself, Hassan squinting into the sun, the lines webbing out around his eyes, a small smile playing like sunlight over his beautiful face.

  She felt like a liar. She had kept something from him: and it was not some frivolous girlish thing. It was the name of the enemy. Not just the enemy of her family, but the enemy now of the entire Palestinian people. That’s how Hassan would think of it, she was sure. At first, she had forgotten the lieutenant and her West Bank protector and everything that happened before, during, and after—and remembered only Ibrahim’s face amid a hubbub of useless whirring activity. But now she could picture the soldier. Little by little, he was coming back to her. It had been a week now. She remembered his eyes were scared. He was useless, but he tried. He crouched over that radio as if it could save him, as if it were something you could rub and a miracle would happen. But it was just communications equipment, and on the other end were Israelis, doing what Israelis do.

  And why was she there, anyway? Dr. Miller and her doctor in Ramallah had told her that when it was bad, Ibrahim’s case could be critical, and he might need extreme measures that they could not provide on the Palestinian side. Still, they had to have had something better than the pointless inhaler that she had tried to use so many times and then finally left behind. She hated the Israelis, hated the soldiers, hated her own sad soldier. His face afterward, the shock trickling out of the corners of his eyes—it wasn’t his loss.

  The Palestinian people were calling for his blood, and she still hadn’t told anyone his name.

  Was she protecting Ari Doron? She didn’t think so.

  She was protecting Hassan, protecting him from what she imagined might be his natural reaction. If a man wants revenge and you give him the information he needs to get it, he’ll use it. If something happened to Doron, Hassan was the likely suspect, in Israeli eyes. But maybe Hassan was above revenge; and maybe he would have understood if she’d told him everything about the soldier—the small good things, the big bad things.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE ARRIVED home with the groceries, her father was sitting in front of the television, watching tennis. His feet were up on a hassock, his left sock had a hole in it. His shirt was undone at the collar. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d been running his hand through it.

  “If all those people who think you’re God could see you now, they would be utterly shocked,” she said. She looked at him over the tops of her grocery bags.

  He put up a finger, didn’t take his eyes off the screen.

  “Ah, good, good,” he said, watching the end of a point. “Sorry,” he said, looking over at her. “Even God is allowed to put his feet up once in a while. What did you get?” His eyes brightened.

  “Lamb.”

  “Lamb,” he said. “You’re wonderful.”

  “Have you had lunch?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He gave her a penetrating look for a second, then went back to the tennis. She raised her eyebrows and went to unload her bags.

  When she came out of the kitchen, he was still spread-eagle in front of his match, but he had fallen asleep.

  He seemed so relaxed, so unlike himself. One arm was flung over the side of the chair, and his trouser legs had both crept up so she could see that sad, vulnerable spot between the end of pants and the beginning of socks. The twin patches of calf were pale white, and the hair on them was sparse. Her legendary father was an old man now, with bald legs. He was snoring gently. He did not look elegant. His glasses had fallen down so that the spectacles were under his chin. He looked like an old Irish character actor on Broadway; all he needed to complete the picture was a tweed cap gone askew. His mouth was slack. Until Hassan, Marina thought, the man I loved best in the world. He would die, too, and then she would be completely alone: Ibrahim dead, Hassan in prison, Daddy dead.

  Two women in whites took their places on opposing sides of the court, and applause came from the television like static, the sound of thousands of tiny hands clapping halfway across the world.

  She sat down and watched, her sewing box on her lap, her father sleeping next to
her, a shirt of his—missing a button—in her hands, two women on the screen, batting the ball between them. Not telling Hassan—it was a gross betrayal of their marriage. But things were different now between them from the way they had been at the beginning. Hassan was isolated and frozen, and Marina was on the outside. With Ibrahim, their greatest connection had disappeared. Hassan had been in prison on and off for Ibrahim’s entire lifetime. He’d been at Moscobiyyeh so long that he had grown fuzzy in Marina’s imagination, like a dead person. Sometimes between visits she almost forgot the timbre of her husband’s voice. That voice was one of his chief attractions, a lithe baritone that could turn sharp and stinging.

  She remembered Hassan in a white shirt standing in the corner of the library at Bir Zeit, where everything was supposed to be hushed and reverential, the two windows behind him facing the desert, and the hot wind streaming in. He was holding some novel between two fingers of one disgusted hand and pointing at its pages as the wind riffled through them, his blues eyes alternately blazing and twinkling, his voice rough, and then sweet, laughing as he deconstructed the bad prose, the bad ideas, making unkind but entirely reasonable jokes at the author’s expense while a crowd of rapt students listened from their library pods to the eloquent storm of his words, denouncing the winner of a Nobel prize.

  She had that mental picture of him, and many others, but each time her private remembrance of him was brought up to date with an actual visit, he seemed to have turned into someone else, a flat empty thing with only one characteristic: one month an angry man, the next, a thin man; one month, a lonely man, the next, hopeless—and not the vivid, complete, compact, brilliant, magnetic person he was when they married. He had slipped out of the stream of humanity. Prison was turning him into a “Palestinian”—after all, he was a political prisoner, and he was in prison not because he was charming and handsome or sad and lonely, but because he was Palestinian. Over time, he was conforming to his jailers’ preconceptions, becoming a distillation of stereotypes of his own refugee race: thin, sun-blasted, angry, hopeless, voluble yet unreachable.

  One of the women came to the net and hit a hard crosscourt backhand that left her opponent looking disheartened and woebegone. Marina heard her father’s breath go in and out, a slow, reassuring sound. Hassan’s hands and his voice and his belief—the man he was—had been her visa back into Palestine, a Palestine other than the dead romantic one her father had envisioned for her, that fairyland of cypress and palm and stone. Hassan had taken her and led her into another place, where there were no wealthy landholding grandfathers, no grass tennis courts, no country tours on velocipede, but instead the yearning call to prayer, and refugee camps and villages on windblown hillsides.

  Teaching her about her homeland had been a passion: You call yourself a Palestinian? Hassan would ask, when she would say something particularly naive. And then he would instruct her. He had pulled her out of her father’s Jerusalem of a half century earlier, and into Ramallah now. She remembered him holding Ibrahim in the visitors’ cell. At least my son is free, he would say at the end of every visit, forgetting he had said it the time before. She was afraid for Hassan now that Ibrahim was dead, and afraid of him at the same time. Even his tenderness was aggressive.

  They had been trying to get Marina and her father to go to that rally tomorrow. The head of the student league at Bir Zeit had called, ostensibly to offer his condolences but really to invite them. He said the students wanted her to speak, as well as George. She might just go to the rally—she would never speak, but she might accompany her father if he decided to go. Family solidarity. She could hide behind him.

  George stirred as the commercials came on: commercials were always louder than the regular programming. Marina coughed to wake him. She wanted company. She coughed again, louder. She’d sewn his button on, admittedly slightly off-center, but nonetheless undeniably attached.

  Marina looked over at her father: he was waking up, reassembling his features, putting the mask back on.

  She tossed the shirt to him and it landed in his lap.

  He picked it up.

  “Oh, right,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “Thanks.”

  He looked at the television.

  “Who’s winning?” he asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  Philip came in, coughing a little as he usually did to announce his presence.

  “Whatever is cooking smells wonderful,” he said. He smiled at Marina with those generous, compassionate brown eyes. She felt tears come into her own. God, was she so vulnerable that a compliment on her cooking could make her cry?

  Philip handed a newspaper to George.

  “They are disgraceful,” Philip said. Marina could see a large spread of photographs, and headlines in Hebrew.

  George looked at the paper, and made a small noise of disgust. He shook his head.

  “Oh my, Philip,” he said.

  Philip nodded.

  “I am so sorry, Marina,” Philip said. He shook his head at her and left the room.

  “What is it?” she asked her father.

  “This,” he said, and handed her newspaper. It was Ha’aretz, she saw.

  She only looked at it for half a second, and then she stood and walked quickly from the room with the paper rolled in her hand.

  “Marina!” her father shouted after her.

  She locked the bathroom door, sat down, and stared at the thing. She couldn’t read the Hebrew, but she knew what they were saying. There was her husband as a boy, holding the hand of his older sister Fatima. Next to that old picture was one that had been used once already, on the day after the incident, a picture of Marina walking Ibrahim down a street in Ramallah. The pictures were so similar, it could have been the same street. And Hassan and Ibrahim looked so much alike—she had never noticed it before. But the Israelis certainly had. Daddy terrorist, baby terrorist. That was the implication; she knew without being able to read. All she could see was Ibrahim. On her lap. She covered the pictures with her hands.

  After a while, she put the paper aside, folded, and stood up to wash her face. She looked at herself: bedraggled, woebegone. Her black hair hung straight down around her face. Under her eyes were circles.

  She walked into the living room where her father was standing, waiting for her return. He shook his head at her. She put the folded newspaper into his outstretched hands, not looking at him. She wanted to remain in control. Pushing aside her sewing kit, she sat down.

  A bus’s horn blared out from down on the road.

  Let’s cause her more pain, George said to himself. The conversation could not wait, he had decided when she ran out of the room. She knew the same secret he knew. Here I go, Lord help me.

  “I had a most peculiar lunch today,” George said.

  “What happened?” Marina asked dully. She clicked off the set and pulled her chair around to face his.

  “It was the company that was strange, actually.” She was so sweet-looking with her hair down, like a dark Rapunzel, gazing at him without her habitual hostility, for some reason. Well, that was about to end.

  “Wasn’t Philip with you?”

  “He brought someone, a lawyer from Ramallah. Actually the lawyer said he was there at the checkpoint the other night.”

  “Oh,” Marina said.

  “Yup,” said George. He pulled up his socks, and looked around for his shoes. Even in front of his daughter, he did not like to be unkempt.

  “So how was Moscobiyyeh today, by the way?” he asked her as he bent over his shoelaces.

  “Fine.”

  “And what does he think?”

  “Say his name, Daddy.” It was hard for her father to bend all the way over his shoes, she noticed. He was breathing hard.

  “What?”

  “Say his name.”

  He looked up at her. He could hear his heart beating. He did not want to pick his head up too fast.

  “Hassan,” he said. “Wha
t does Hassan think?”

  “What does he think? About what?”

  “What does he want to do with the name, Marina?”

  “I don’t think he knows the soldier’s name,” she said. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

  “Yes,” said George. “Yes, that’s exactly what we’re talking about.” He summoned a flinty glare for Marina, a look she hadn’t seen in a long time, but not one she had forgotten.

  “Do you know the name, Marina?” George asked. The flinty glare was gone. “Because I do.”

  “The lawyer from Ramallah,” she said after a pause. “He told you?”

  “Yup,” George said. “He told me. Seemed to feel it was his duty. He says he forced the soldier to let you into the trailer.”

  “That’s when everything started to get really bad,” Marina said. She remembered the heat of Ibrahim’s flushed skin against her hands as she sat on that flimsy metal chair. She had put her hands under his sweatshirt to see how bad his retractions were. She remembered the feel of him heating up in her arms.

  She stood up, turning away from her father. She picked her sewing kit up from the small rattan table next to her chair, and zipped it shut.

  “It was a very bad night, sweetheart,” George said to her.

  Her back shook slightly. He wanted to go over to her, but he wasn’t sure. Could she stand it? Could he?

  “I can’t, I still can’t talk about it,” she said.

  “We don’t have to,” George said.

  “Maybe we do have to,” Marina said, her face still averted. “But I can’t.”

  “Do you want me to go to Ahmed with the name?”

  “Uncle Ahmed?” Marina asked. “No. No. Why should we tell Uncle Ahmed? I haven’t even told Hassan.”

  Good, George thought.

  “And Hassan deserves to know,” she said. “Ahmed doesn’t. This is what I think: The soldier was there. That makes him a useful symbol: that’s why my uncle is so interested in him. But there’s more to it. There’s more.”