Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  “Nitzan says someone told the soldier to stop the baby and his mother.”

  Yizhar’s ears perked up behind his paper.

  “What?”

  “The dead Arab baby. The fucking soldier supposedly says someone at Defense told him not to let them in. Can you believe it?”

  “How do you know? Nitzan’s a committed liar.”

  “Yes, but everyone says the same thing. Story came out of The Building.”

  Yizhar peered out from behind Yediot. It was a table of four regulars. They were hunched over their Nescafés. As they talked, little silver waves of cigarette smoke curled up from the center of the table and flashed like a school of sardines ascending in the sunlight. Yizhar couldn’t see who was saying what.

  “I say it’s Palestinian disinformation.”

  “Nah, nah, someone in Defense says the soldier himself says it.”

  “Hah . . . he tell you himself?”

  “The guy’s just trying to shift the blame.”

  “Nope. Straight shooter, they say.”

  “He could get The Building in big trouble.”

  “No. It’ll never come out. Still, the question is, why is Nitzan spreading the story? He’s such a schmuck. He’s probably trying to fuck someone—the question is who. What do you think? Is it possible? What he says?”

  The half of the yellow potato left in Yizhar’s bowl took on a sickening tinge. He put down his spoon and waited for the table of gossips to leave. Who knew who might recognize him? The minute they were out, he stood. He had to get back to The Building, make a plan. The story was spinning away from him. Zvili and his big mouth? Or one of the other soldiers? Or just guys at The Building who hoped it was true, who wanted to get someone in trouble, stir things up, and move people around, free up some jobs. . . . He paid, said goodbye to the man with warts, and made his way to the door, pushing through a group that was about to be seated. He walked quickly past the travel agency and the bookstore whose windows had been blown out by the bus bomb. NEW AND USED, said the bookstore’s sign. It was all clean and put back together now, but he remembered the blood on the jagged shards of glass. Little flaps of flesh had hung down from the sign. He needed Doron, now. Yizhar felt his stomach churn and cramp. He was sweating: himself the human beast. The cold afternoon breeze swept over Jaffa Road and pricked the wet skin of his neck.

  • • •

  YIZHAR FAST-FORWARDED the tape of the news through what must have been long, painful minutes of dull political back-patting speeches by boring Arabs. In a corner of the crowd, he caught something wrong or awkward, something artificial. There he is. It’s his scarf that looks wrong, and those ill-advised pants with a sharp shiny crease and no cuffs. He’s moving at the front of the crowd. And the woman. This is the problem, Yizhar thought, studying Marina Raad. This is the whole damn problem. The beauty of very few women showed beneath the severe contours of the hijab. Hers did. She had a kind of radiance, and good bones. Until now, Yizhar had only seen still photos of the bereaved mother, but this person was someone utterly else. Her stare was commanding and she held herself with what must have been innate authority, since this was not a situation she was in charge of. Standing there just apart from her father, she looked like the future prime minister of a third-world country, the one who would inevitably inherit the mantle. Yizhar clicked the remote.

  Not permitted, he kept thinking. You are not permitted to go near these people. And Doron looked pathetic in his Palestinian getup. My God. Imagine stooping low enough to put on those schmattes. No self-respecting Israeli would ever think of it. Answer: Doron was no longer self-respecting. Couldn’t all those people in the crowd detect the impostor in their midst? But they weren’t interested. They wanted to see the tragic Raad family, they wanted to see the wife of Hassan Hajimi, and most of all, they wanted to watch the legendary Ahmed Amr, favorite son of Ramallah, Amr’s father’s ancestral home. Marina Raad was the only one who happened to be paying attention. Yizhar was angry at Doron for being there, but he was fascinated. In all his years upholding, enforcing, and controlling, Yizhar had never seen quite the likes of this one. The new generation has lost its mind, was one of his conclusions. He turns away from me, thought Yizhar, and walks among Them.

  Raad was speaking now. Yizhar listened without concentrating hard enough to understand. Content did not matter. Yizhar’s Arabic was decent, but Channel Two had voiced over a Hebrew analysis, so that it was almost impossible to hear Raad’s voice. Whatever the man was saying was not complimentary to Amr and the Authority. Good, thought Yizhar, create a schism, widen the breach, get ’em fighting. Nothing better than a dogfight. But Yizhar’s mind was only half on the tape now that Doron was no longer on camera. The boy must be reined in, Yizhar was thinking. Sequestration, like Gertler? It was his favorite daydream. Idle fantasy. But still, maybe you can spin him again. Take him for one more turn around the room. Then dump him, if you have to. Let them finish him off. Yizhar was glad he had helped with the Hajimi release.

  The message light on Yizhar’s telephone was blinking red. He pressed in his code and listened. Oh, how rumors travel inside an army—it was almost as if the senior staff were bivouacked along a ridge somewhere, playing a game, repeating things down the line. There were just a few messages, only from men who knew about the secure Jerusalem line. Almost every message asked the same question: Was the story true?

  It was getting late; without looking at his watch, he could tell the approximate time because from far down his hall, he could hear the ominous approach of the Russian woman with her vacuum cleaner. Her shift began at ten. The sucking roar—he closed his eyes, put his head back over the edge of his chair, and breathed, and thought about Gertler: failed general, happy if brief prime minister, advising now at Defense. Fate was something Yizhar enjoyed mulling over, but his mind was fuzzy. Historical detail wouldn’t come. Yizhar felt as if his tired brain were clogged with dust and lint that the Russian’s vacuum could suck up into a disposable dust-filled bag. He did not like to hear gossip about himself, his work. What he did was supposed to be leakproof, yet there were men at Chezy sitting there like stuffed derma and talking about the details of his case. Fabled Israeli intelligence: full of double agents, incompetents, frauds, and blabbermouths. It must be Zvili who was talking; Doron would never talk—not idly, anyway. The vacuum was coming closer, homing in on its target: him.

  Yizhar had wanted Gertler’s life, but Gertler got it. Gertler got it in spite of himself. After the breakdown, Gertler’s brilliance dissipated and his energy vanished, but it never seemed to matter. Instead of falling into a pit of oblivion, he went on to become chief of staff, head of the Labor party, prime minister for a few months, now back to running Labor from behind the scenes, dispensing useless, unheeded pointers to the Defense Minister. He seemed to have led an enviable life, and if Yizhar could have, he would have simply jumped inside the man’s skin and assumed his identity.

  But instead, Yizhar was left to pace the West Bank, hunting for prey among the sad tin and cinder-block houses, stuck till the light turned blue in the refugee camps, wasting his time on layabout terrorists and two-bit fanatics, reduced further, now, he felt, to a slightly sordid attempt to quash truth and save the country’s not unspotted honor, when he should have been running the country. At least the West Bank had been action, but what action was this, now? Second in charge of security during the “peace” turned out to mean public relations, chatting up Avram Shell, controlling the incidents.

  • • •

  YIZHAR WAS TRAPPED, hiding up here in his black den with the lights off, listening to the sucking roar of the vacuum cleaner down the hall. He did his best thinking in the dark—the darker the better in this mood. It freed his mind from extraneous details like the latest scratch on the new desk, the dying philodendron. He could examine the most obscure things—for example, he acknowledged to himself, his own emotions, his own intentions—more clearly in this gloom. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands over h
is open eyes to conjure an even greater dark. On the screen made by his palms, he saw Doron’s face. His cupped hands magnified the sound of his own breathing.

  If he looked at the situation closely, too closely, it turned out that he was afraid. He was afraid Doron would fly away, out of his hands. Losing control was something Yizhar did not do gracefully, and he would go to great lengths to ensure that he did it very rarely. He stood to open his window. He wanted to let something in—the night air, the dark sky, something besides himself. He clutched at the narrow sill. The rain that had started up after lunch had ended, the clouds had parted, and the moon hung above the winged lion on top of the Generali building. Below, life was a party. The traffic was stopped and honking. Then the light across from his window changed and people crossed the street in a rush. He heard laughter. An angry voice rose up, what was it saying? But Yizhar couldn’t make it out: angry gibberish moving away down Jaffa. People were walking up the street and down, off to have a drink, a dance.

  Yizhar’s cell phone rang. He turned from the window and his heart raced like a lover’s. Let it be him. But quickly he convinced himself: It will be Zvili, or Reuven. It will be the dentist canceling an appointment. He opened the phone and put it gingerly to his ear.

  “Yes?” he said.

  First there was silence. A breath, a sigh. Hesitation and doubt, Yizhar thought.

  “Yes?” he said again.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” came the voice.

  Yizhar exhaled. It was his man. Doron’s voice was low, tense. Yizhar heard cars and pedestrian traffic like an echo in the background. The noises sounded peculiarly familiar.

  “Where are you?” asked Yizhar. A mistake—never ask what you want to know.

  “Here and there,” said Doron.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Yizhar answered. “You are in big trouble.”

  “Oh?” said Doron.

  “Yes,” answered Yizhar. “You’ve been out touring the countryside. Not good.”

  “Maybe,” said Doron, but there was a nuance of superiority in his voice. “Are you at your office?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” Yizhar said.

  “I thought you would be,” said Doron. “So am I. Come let me in.”

  • • •

  TOO IMPATIENT TO WAIT for the elevator, Yizhar took the narrow dark stairway down to open the door for Doron.

  Through a grille on the front entryway, he pointed Doron to the side entrance, a low steel door with multiple locks and a computer code that would only open after a personal identification number from a Building staffer was entered. A grown man had to duck his head to come in The Building’s side door. As he entered, Doron ducked, and it looked like a gesture of submission and subordination, almost like an unacknowledged salute. But Yizhar was not fooled by appearances. He did not put out his hand for a handshake. The two men looked at each other.

  “Come up,” Yizhar said, turning his back. He felt just a small nip of fear as he turned away—who knew: the boy might be unhinged—but he turned away.

  Doron followed him. They went up flight after flight—Doron lost count trying to keep pace with Yizhar. When they got to Yizhar’s floor, Doron heard the roar of something behind them, down the hallway. The linoleum tapped beneath his shoes. This floor of The Building was empty at night. It felt like a cave to Doron, dark, empty, echoing.

  Yizhar didn’t bother to flick on the lights in his office.

  “Come in,” he said.

  Doron looked around the unlit room.

  “Do you always work in the dark?” he asked.

  “I think better in the dark,” Yizhar said. “It helps when I’m working on something important. And difficult.”

  “I hope my case is not so difficult.”

  “I don’t understand you, Lieutenant, truly I don’t. Sit down. Why are you here?”

  “Zvili said you wanted to see me.”

  “I’ve seen enough of you already today. On a tape from Channel Two. At that rally in Ramallah.”

  Doron looked down at the floor.

  “So?” he said.

  “So? You were there.” Yizhar looked at Doron. In the half-light, he caught the knobby outline of the scarf that was wrapped loosely around the soldier’s neck. Did he wear this outfit all the time, now? The rope to hang yourself—the phrase passed fleetingly through Yizhar’s mind.

  “It’s a violation of our agreement,” Yizhar said. “You’re ready to go there again, aren’t you? You look foolish.”

  Doron looked away from the wall he’d been staring at and focused on Yizhar’s silhouette against the patch of moonlit sky in the window. Backlit, the brush of the officer’s hair stood out from his head like the blade of a hatchet.

  Doron was exhausted. He’d spent almost all the previous night wandering around the Old City, disoriented and jangling from his scramble through the wadi. Near dawn, he’d taken a bus over to his mother’s and slept for a few hours. The house had been empty. His mother was down in the Negev overnight, teaching at the university. When Doron awoke, he had rummaged through his closet until he found his blue-jean jacket, removed the empty cigarette pack and stuck it in his pants pocket. If he could only get access to a military phone and call the secure number he’d copied down that night, he thought he had a good chance of finding the man who had given him his orders. For what it was worth.

  Yizhar walked around the office, moving things in the dark, straightening them, putting papers into piles, kicking the side of the Jane’s Defence stack.

  “Marina Raad is quite pretty, by the way,” Yizhar said, looking up at Doron. Even in the shadows, he could see the soldier react. A slight step back, tension in the shoulders, as if he were getting ready to take a blow.

  “You think?” asked Doron after a second.

  The soldier’s shadowy features were unreadable.

  “So, are we enemies now?” Doron asked.

  “I sincerely hope not,” said Yizhar. “That would be very bad for you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you, and have you listen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. And then, to have you do as I say.”

  Doron sat on a hard chair in front of Yizhar’s desk. “It sounds as if your plan hasn’t changed much since we last spoke,” he said. The moon shone down in patches, touching his shoulders and his hair and brow and the angles of his face with white light. What Yizhar could see of him looked like an ancient stone head of a boy, floating in midair. His eyes were huge and dark. Who was this boy, this man, now? What was he capable of? The roar down the hall was growing louder.

  “Why should the plan change?” Yizhar asked.

  Doron just looked at him.

  “This is my thinking,” Yizhar said to him. Doron gazed out the window at the winged lion. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Doron nodded his head curtly.

  “We have a problem. The first problem is this: They want you. The second problem is this: You don’t know what you want. Except you want to be a hero. Fine.”

  “I don’t want to be a hero.”

  “Good.”

  Yizhar sat down at the edge of his desk. He fiddled in the dark with his tape recorder.

  “Do you want me to be a hero?” Doron asked.

  Yizhar looked up from his fiddling. “I despise heroes.”

  “Ah. He despises heroes.”

  “Heroes act, and other people suffer. I hate that.”

  “You have a very dark view of things,” Doron said.

  “Everything I am, I became in the army. I’m just an army boy,” Yizhar said. “That’s what you were supposed to be, too. Before you became a Palestinian.”

  Doron began to rise from his chair.

  Yizhar stood quickly, and came forward and pushed him back down, a light push, gentle, on his breastbone. Doron sat down. Yizhar could hear the man’s breath. It was quick and shallow.

  “I’m through talking to you,” Doron said
in a fierce whisper.

  “Oh, no. Wrong. We have lots to talk about, habibi,” Yizhar said. Now he would use that word with Doron. Its familiarity would humiliate the boy, or at least, he would understand that there was an implied condescension.

  Yizhar shut the door on the faint light of the hallway, and the room turned a deep blue. Doron could hear Yizhar’s voice but could only see his outline as he paced. “Listen: I don’t like the bullshit, okay? You talk to those people, you’re court-martialed, do you understand? Court-martialed in a secret proceeding. You’re finished. Second: Hajimi is going to be released, and very soon. I worked hard for this release, but trust me, you don’t want to be standing around Ramallah like some fool in costume when he comes out.

  “Satisfy my curiosity, okay?” Yizhar said. “This is what I’m curious about—and let’s put it starkly: Are you a patriot or are you a traitor? Let’s find out, okay?”

  “What’s the test, Colonel?”

  “This is the test: Tomorrow afternoon, at one o’clock, I’ve set up a session for you at Army Radio and you are going to go over there and you are going to have a little give-and-take with my friend Avram Shell. A chat, we call it. Sort of impromptu.”

  Yizhar leaned over his desk and picked up a few pieces of paper from beneath a paperweight that had a blue Star of David embedded in it. He waved the paper at Doron. The white sheets flapped in the moonlight like the wings of an exhausted bird.