Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  “Like?”

  “He was trying to get an okay for us to go across. But there was a problem.”

  “A problem.”

  “On the phone. He ran into a problem; it was all set, and then there was a problem.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “Who was the problem. There was someone he was talking to, he got bumped up from person to person, and at the end there was a problem with who we were, or something, he kept saying ‘Hajimi, Hajimi,’ and things like ‘I don’t care who the father is the boy is sick, sick, sick—mamash, mamash choleh’—I couldn’t understand everything, it was in Hebrew, but I understood that.”

  “So?”

  “So then, well, at first I could see he was just going to do what they said, obey orders. He kept saying sorry to me, as if that would make it all right. But then a little while later, he looked at us again and he could see it was so bad, so bad, and he said, basically, he was going to let us in. I could hear the ambulance coming, but . . .”

  George looked at her back. Tears surprised him, overflowing his eyes. He wiped them away quickly.

  “It seemed so quick, all of a sudden,” she said.

  “Oh, Marina,” he said.

  There was a long silence. Her shoulders trembled, but there were no sobs. The afternoon light filtered in through the shutters. The neighbors’ television droned on and on.

  “So,” she said finally. “So, I just feel something about him.”

  “You mean, the Israeli.”

  “Yes, him. The commanding officer.”

  “And what’s the something you feel, sweetheart?”

  “That we went through it together. That he was trying to be on my side.” There. She had said it. It wasn’t something she wanted to admit. She was furious with the soldier. She couldn’t bear the thought of him. But there was no denying one thing. He had been trying to be on their side. She could never admit it to Hassan, because Hassan could never allow it to be true. His whole world was built on another point of view. Drunken dogs, killers, usurpers, evil, the devil. She knew the litany, had never argued with it. She agreed more or less. Her father was pretty much in accord, too.

  But her father would be able to understand her confusion. Confusion was repugnant to Hassan. Whereas George’s element was ambiguity, ambivalence.

  “That’s what I think, anyway,” she said. “And that I don’t want my husband to get involved with this. Finding the soldier is beside the point to me. Not to Uncle Ahmed, but to me. One stupid soldier is not to blame.”

  “Maybe.” George looked at the blank television screen.

  “You would say: ‘It’s not the individual, it is the state. The state is criminal, the individual is merely acting in accordance with an inhuman and unacceptable system.’ ”

  “Is that what I’d say?”

  “It’s what you have said, actually.” She sat back down on the chair that faced his.

  “And yet, there are Israelis and there are Israelis.”

  “Not according to my husband.”

  “Say his name, Marina.”

  “Hassan says, and I know he’s dogmatic, that you cannot—you must not—distinguish among Israelis: each one is a criminal, because the state is criminal. He starts from your proposition, but reaches the opposite conclusion.”

  That’s why she loves him, thought George.

  “Ahhhh,” he said. “A hard man. No exemption for the innocent.”

  She sat quietly for a minute. “He’s not a hard man, Daddy.”

  “Yes he is, rabbit. He’s hard. Just not to you. I hope.”

  “He’s not hard at all. He’s broken, now.” She began to cry, but without drama. Just tears coming down.

  “Life is wretched,” George said. He watched her, but even under his scrutiny, she did not stop crying. Slowly, he cranked himself up from his chair and went over to her. She just sat there, staring blankly at his now-empty chair, with tears running down her cheeks and falling onto her sewing kit. There he was, next to her. He put a hand on her shoulder and she put one of hers up to cover his, as if in thanks. Thanks for what, he asked himself. Thanks for nothing.

  Marina looked like a refugee, still wearing the long dark robe she often wore for shopping. He wanted to whisk her away from all this. She should be living in a split-ranch with a station wagon in the driveway, poor darling—or in a bohemian Parisian penthouse. Not in these drab Ramallah quarters. And her husband. He should be an orthodontist in Chicago—or an artist or a professor, not a bitter, deprived man, incarcerated in some sandy dungeon, gloomily plotting the destruction of his enemies. Her baby should not be moldering in the grave. Her father should not be leaving her this terrible legacy. George was growing impatient. He wanted to do something, not just go pat, pat, pat, there, there.

  Marina wiped her eyes and moved away from her father’s comforting hand.

  “I’m going to go fix dinner,” she said. She folded his mended shirt and put it on the coffee table.

  “Can I help?” George asked.

  She looked at him and shook her head. He watched her leave.

  • • •

  PHILIP CAME BACK into the room, as if he’d been waiting just outside for the correct moment to return.

  George looked at Philip, shrugged, and lifted his open hands in a gesture of befuddlement.

  “So?” asked Philip.

  George sat down heavily in front of the television.

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, Philip, absolutely nothing has changed.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I intend to sit here with this fellow’s name in my lap and do nothing about it.”

  “I assumed,” said Philip. He looked at George and then down at the Israeli newspaper, which was half hidden by the shirt Marina had sewn. “What about the rally tomorrow? Are you going?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I certainly don’t want to.” George sat there. “I’m tired.” He folded his hands in his lap. He supposed he should go to the damned rally. The students had asked him. Not Ahmed. Maybe that was the place to make a stand.

  “Just because Ahmed will be there doesn’t mean you can’t say what you think, you know,” Philip said. “Just because he’s from a Ramallah family doesn’t mean he’s in charge.”

  “You’re right. I do have some sort of cultural reluctance to disagree with him live and in public,” George said. “That’s partly why I don’t want to go. Don’t want to be rude. Spoil his fun.”

  “Uh-hunh.” Philip picked up the paper and looked at the pictures of Ibrahim and Hassan. “I’m a novice at all this, Doctor, but maybe you could try to . . . redirect the debate tomorrow. It can be your forum. You know how to do it; I’ve seen you do it a hundred times. Remember? You always say: ‘I hijacked it.’ So, hijack Ahmed’s program. I know you want to. Take control; run away with it.”

  “Yah,” said George. “Maybe.” He lapsed into silence. He was listening to his heart tumbling in his chest, rumbling and tumbling like a deep-sea acrobat. He didn’t tell Philip. If you told Philip, you ended up in the emergency room. George figured he himself knew enough to decide when it was a crisis and when it was just fatigue and the normal tumbling of a human heart.

  There was definitely some satisfaction in knowing the name and not sharing it. Sheukhi had wanted George to rush off to Hassan or the Chairman with the Israeli lieutenant’s name. But George was not in any hurry about this business. He didn’t know what Hassan was capable of, but he didn’t want his son-in-law reunited with Marina only to be rearrested by the Israelis when the soldier disappeared. And he simply refused to give the information to Ahmed, to offer Ahmed another weapon in the political campaign he was waging in Ibrahim’s name.

  George felt like a small boy hoarding his new marbles. Marina was miserable because she hadn’t told Hassan what she knew, but George did not feel even a twinge of remorse about keeping a secret from Ahmed. No, he was delighted. He only wished there was some way to inform Ahmed that he knew the sold
ier’s name and was withholding it. It was a victory of inaction, because surely the Authority would get the soldier’s name if they really wanted it, which he doubted.

  Still it was a triumph—a small and passing triumph. He knew that what he was doing—or not doing—was right and there was satisfaction in that, as well. Talking to Marina today had only confirmed what he already believed: that the commanding officer was not the guilty party. Life is more complicated. The problem of Palestine was that everyone wanted things simple: everyone was an extremist because everyone wanted things simple. It was the problem of humanity. Good and evil, as if there were only those two.

  The interesting thing was to seek truth and then face it, even if the truth was that the commanding officer was not a cruel, birdbrained, Palestinian-hating, Zionist murderer. Even if the truth turned out to be that Marina loved a man who believed in terror and in death, even if the truth was that Ahmed was probably not such a bad man after all. Even if the truth was that George was nearly finished with the thing.

  And yet there was one more item on the agenda. Philip raised the question: Should he speak at this rally? Philip said: Take your opportunity. Use it for your own purposes. It doesn’t matter who provides the occasion, the platform. Remember? Hijack it. Hijack it. George thought: I just might.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE MONTH OF RAMADAN WAS coming up. He noticed the clear plastic bags of seasonal tamarind juice hanging from the stalls outside Damascus Gate as he drove a circuitous route back down toward The Building from the police station up on King David. Yizhar was sure it would make the problems at the checkpoints even worse. It was like the fucking Intifada out there, these days.

  He lowered the windshield visor to protect his eyes from the late afternoon sun. Yizhar hated Ramadan, and so did the entire Israeli security apparatus. Purification of the soul was arguably something desirable—perhaps not Yizhar’s cup of tea, but still conceivably worthwhile—but Ramadan put the Palestinians in a worse mood than usual, if that was possible. Their eternal unhappy mix of depression and resentment turned into something even less palatable during the monthlong fast. They were ravenous from sunup to sundown, and then stuffed themselves all night and got hardly any sleep. In the morning, they were so exhausted from eating all night that they could barely get out of bed, much less go to work, and so the whole rickety Palestinian economy virtually collapsed. Then, too, they went to the mosque more than usual, which meant they had nothing to do but listen to a bunch of foul sheikhs spew anti-Israel Islamist propaganda. It was a time for conspiracies and festering plots to come to fruition. At the end of the month, they were low on calories but full of ideas, which was always a volatile combination. So what do they do? They get together by the tens of thousands for a final starvation-driven prayer at the Dome of the Rock. Who knew what mischief they’d get into afterward? Their holy men used to shoot off a 78-millimeter cannon to signal the end of fasting, but a few years earlier, the Israelis had put an end to that. We didn’t want them handling any kind of heavy artillery in the middle of Jerusalem. No way. Even though the gun was made in 1918, and rusting, and perched at the edge of a cemetery.

  Yizhar looked down briefly at the passenger seat next to him. The beautiful front page lay open beneath his new cell phone. He felt almost gleeful. His trophy was a photograph of a big-eyed little boy, about four years old, in formal pants, solid-looking shoes, a white shirt, and a little jacket, holding on to a big girl’s hand, one of his older sisters, as it turned out. Veiled, of course. Yizhar wished it were the boy’s mother, not his sister, but you couldn’t have everything in this world and this picture was a little gift from God. A fucking bauble, a treasure. That sweet little boy looking up at his sister with big trusting eyes was Hassan Hajimi, the infamous Hamasnik. The picture hadn’t been easy to get: Yizhar had had to use one of their best men on the West Bank, and it was a risk to put such a good man in danger on such a theoretical propaganda exercise, but Yizhar thought the public-opinion payback would be worth it, and he persuaded his boss to get the go-ahead from intelligence. Everything went according to Yizhar’s plan, for once, and he’d seen the picture on every newsstand in every superette this morning, next to the picture everyone had already seen, of big-eyed little Ibrahim holding his mother’s hand. No Israeli would fail to get the point: cute little Palestinians grow up to be big Palestinians.

  Pieces were falling into place. Yizhar was more or less pleased with the Hajimi case, it was going well. Damage control was fun, although there was a lot of damage to control on this one. The Find the Soldier thing was really very irritating: as if anyone who had any power to find him would want to. What would the Authority do with an Israeli soldier? It wasn’t as if the Chairman were still in charge of a terrorist organization, even though he probably still thought of himself as a rifle-toting commando—he wasn’t about to take an Israeli soldier and summarily execute him, which is what the population would probably want. No, today the Chairman was just an old bald man with a quivering lower lip and shaking hands. And yet the thing kept on going. Only yesterday, two Palestinians had been killed and twenty wounded in riots at the checkpoints. The Authority was calling out the troops, using the shabab again. They thought that the Israelis might succumb to the pressures of violence and make a concession or two in the negotiations.

  Of course the concept of the Israelis succumbing to anything was ill-founded. No one forced the Israelis to do anything. The country was a law unto itself, and Yizhar liked it that way: a rogue nation riding roughshod over others, trampling norms and shoving aside accepted wisdom. Small but scrappy. We were the new cowboys—yeah, it was outmoded to think this way, but then again, Yizhar was an old-fashioned guy.

  Doron was the only meaningful variable. If he went along, then everything worked. If he didn’t, chaos. There wasn’t much difference between Doron’s story and Yizhar’s story, but still, the discrepancy was enough to make a controversy, if you felt like making a controversy, which everyone did, the Palestinians, the media, the “international community”—whoever the fuck that was; basically, it was the rest of the world, which always supported the Palestinians. The minute the boy started talking about phone calls and superiors and orders from above, the whole thing could get seriously out of hand.

  It was too risky. There might actually be records of actual calls that actually had been made. Real facts could come out. Yizhar hated real facts because their revelation could create uncontrollable situations. Doron must toe the line, keep to the story. Even a whisper of a hint about that alleged call meant trouble, if the information came from an Israeli. Alleged, Yizhar liked that word. The call, the orders, a high-ranking officer at work at night. Yizhar had told Doron and Zvili that no one on earth could possibly believe such a story but in fact, the opposite was true. Everyone would believe Doron: the boy was unassailably honest. Anyone capable of doing a quick read of character would know immediately that it would not occur to such a soldier to lie to save his own ass. Yizhar would keep Doron quiet. He knew how to manipulate the human beast—his life’s work, really. The soldier’s little piece of information was too dangerous. Of all things, Yizhar did not want the man who gave Doron the orders to be found, to even be imagined.

  Yizhar had been thinking about the human beast recently. Precious, useful creature. Zvili was a good example. Zvili wanted to do well in life. Zvili was just a little afraid of his wife, and very afraid of Yizhar. And Zvili was worried, also. He knew he had not acquitted himself well at the time of the incident, that he had let reflexive anger get the better of him, when a cooler head should have prevailed. Zvili knew Doron should not be shouldering all the guilt for the child’s death. But Zvili was human, and when he saw Doron feeling guilty, his own guilt—what little he felt—dissipated. Doron felt guilty? Why then, he probably was guilty. That was how Zvili rationalized. It was the usual self-protective, self-serving, survivor’s instinct that Yizhar had come to expect from the beast. It made Zvili into a good ally.

&nbs
p; God, what an assignment, Yizhar thought, shaking his head. He was becoming a smarter person for it, and smart, he reminded himself, did not mean evil. Smart was smart. Smart survived. Dumb died. One of Yizhar’s rules of war. His cell phone beeped. He pressed the special button on the dashboard.

  “Yizhar, here,” he said.

  “Sir, it’s Zvili.”

  He knew the boy would come through.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” said Yizhar.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” Zvili said.

  “Not at all,” said Yizhar. “What’s up, Sergeant?”

  “I saw our man,” Zvili said.

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s upset. He says he wants to do something to make everything all right.”

  “Like what?” asked Yizhar. Talk like this made him nervous. Make everything all right? That was impossible. “What do you think he meant?”

  “I don’t know, talking to the media, maybe. Telling his side.” Zvili paused. “He seemed upset that you had, uh, taken control of the story. He seemed to feel you weren’t interested in certain things he told you.”

  “Yes, well, he’s right.” Maybe he had been too aggressive with Doron, too arrogant. Not caring and sensitive enough—but really. What did the boy expect? Therapy? A rap session?

  “I told him you were on his side. That you were trying to help him. He said that I didn’t know which side he was on.”

  Damn, damn.

  “I should call him,” Yizhar said.

  “If he doesn’t call you. I gave him this number, hope that wasn’t wrong.”

  “No, no, best thing you could do. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, sir.” Zvili hesitated slightly. “Oh, yes. He told me he’s got the number he dialed that night somewhere, and he’s looking for it.”

  Yizhar closed his eyes.

  “There was no such number,” he heard himself say.

  “That’s basically what I told him, sir,” Zvili said.

  “Anything else?” Yizhar asked. But what else could there be, really?