by Amy Wilentz
The Israelis had told her her boy had died for the Jews and that was almost as big a lie as the Palestinians’ trying to convince him that his had died for the Palestinians. Only a monster would fail to recognize the parallel, or someone who was shielding his eyes from a distasteful truth, and George was bent on resisting everything that generated blindness and monstrousness. He had not become, overnight—over one particular night—some kind of mush-headed humanist, but he was trying hard to keep in mind the value of what was human, the value of each person’s own short-lived story. He was refusing, deliberately, to deny human empathy, no matter between whom. Deny human empathy and go down as a villain, he believed.
It was always wrong for the young to die before their elders, he thought: young soldiers were a clever tool invented by the middle-aged and the elderly to ensure their own continuing comfort. Young martyrs, too. If someone had to die for the cause of Palestine—and history had certainly shown that someone did—why not George or Ahmed or even Hassan, why not Leila or the Prime Minister? Instead, his grandson was dead, her son was dead. Maybe in some vast eternal balance, her son deserved to be dead more than his grandson did—to pay back for the house, all the houses, the orchards, the vineyards, the refugees, the war dead, the fifty years (so far!) of statelessness—or perhaps (from the skewed Israeli point of view) Ibrahim was a minor, acceptable sacrifice for saving the Jews from another round of slaughter. But judging it from within the smaller, more precious frame of human reference, both boys should be standing here right now making faces at each other, the little one following the big one around and hanging on his legs.
“I am so sorry,” George said to Leila, and meant it, as much as he could. She looked at him gratefully.
History was a sad business.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DORON WOKE AT DAWN IN the backseat of the jalopy. He picked his head up and peered out the window. A red bus bounced past. He was parked out in front of the Peugeot dealership, a block from the Talpiot circle. He felt his face; covered in stubble—no wonder he’d looked like a derelict to himself the night before. He squinted into the mirror and saw what looked like the face of a prisoner who had been held for a long time in the dark and now was brought up into the early morning sunshine. He squinted and blinked. It was a cool morning. His mouth tasted sour.
On his way to Kakal Street, a pair of headlights was trailing his car. He thought so, anyway. It was all Yizhar’s fault. Doron mistrusted Yizhar, but at the same time, he believed Yizhar, believed in Yizhar, in the force of his personality, his unwavering sincerity, whether for good or for evil. If Yizhar said he had a security detail on Doron, then he did, that was Doron’s thinking. What Yizhar said was always true, at least in its essence. The headlights disappeared. Yizhar knew everything, and was running the game from way up in his aerie at The Building.
A small security detail, Yizhar had said. At this hour, the streets were filling up with red public buses overflowing with soldiers going to and from base. Right now, Doron saw only one other passenger car, a bus or two behind him. He didn’t like believing so strongly in someone of whom he was suspicious. But weren’t those the same headlights behind him again, here on Kakal Street outside his mother’s house? Probably not, probably not. Doron parked in his mother’s shelter. The car’s motor died with a shudder and a clunk. He thought he heard something sweep behind him as he walked up the short path to his mother’s side door. Yizhar had put a tail on him.
Or maybe it was Hajimi.
Doron let himself in and flicked lights on in the hallway to the kitchen. His mother was asleep but would be up soon. Not for the first time, he thought it would be nice if he had some money and could get himself his own place. He stood in front of the refrigerator and examined its contents. It was spartan fare, a half dozen eggs and a half liter of low-fat milk and two containers of yogurt, some old hard Bulgarian cheese and a couple of rewrapped pita loaves—the refrigerator of an old person, he thought. He sectioned the one remaining lemon and ate it with some yogurt.
The yellowed photograph of his parents on the shores of the Kinneret was in its place next to the coffee machine on the sideboard, surrounded by bowls of fruit. His father was leaning on his crutch, as usual. He was the only man in the world who looked jaunty with a crutch. He was about Doron’s age in the photo. Doron’s mother had her eyes locked on her husband, and was holding on to his arm as her skirt blew around her. They were a honeymooning couple, about to make a baby. It was hard imagining them before his birth. To him it seemed as if they had met and fallen in love and gotten married and gone to the Kinneret all with the express purpose of creating him. But why? To set him down in this world to meet his fate? If they had only imagined.
He went into the bathroom to shave, and watched his real self reemerge. In his old room, Doron sat down heavily on the bed. This was now his mother’s study. It was filled with her archaeology books, the endless Encyclopedia Judaica, books on the Philistines and the Persians, and odd collected artifacts from digs around the Middle East. Sitting on a shelf was A Land Without People, written by her mentor, the title a reference to the hopeful Zionist description of pre-Israel Palestine. He kicked off his dusty faux-leather loafers. A land without people, for a people without a land.
He unwrapped his long scarf. He laid it on the bed next to him alongside the wool hat he’d been wearing and looked at these, his accessories. They were utterly alien to him. The disguise was finished. From now on, he would go where he had to go in his own uniform. He hunted for it in the closet. Yes, he would greet misfortune as himself. His father’s crutch and cane leaned up against the back wall. He noticed the honeymoon suit, his father’s only suit, wrapped up in plastic, left hanging alongside his father’s other clothes almost ten years after he’d died. This was the family museum. Doron’s old stuff was here, too, miscellaneous athletic gear, his old scrapbook from his first days in the army, photos of the revered tanks of the past and pictures of the heroes—Dayan and Motta Gur, and Gertler, of course—stacked up on the closet floor. Doron shook his head at his former self as he riffled through the hangers to find his uniform. He put on each article of clothing carefully, and checked the embroidered insignias on his sleeves to make sure they were straight.
• • •
“YOU’RE HERE?” his mother asked. She stood in the kitchen doorway. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You were asleep,” he said. He sat at the kitchen table, staring at the back of a cereal box. The sun was just coming up over the terrace wall. His mother walked past him quickly toward the coffee machine. He knew she didn’t like to be seen by anyone, even him, this early in the morning. Her hair stuck out like a lion’s ratty mane.
“You’re in uniform,” she said.
He picked his beret up from the table and put it on.
“It looks good.” She went to the refrigerator and pulled a bag of coffee out of the freezer. “You look like your father.” She opened the coffee and began spooning it into the filter.
He got up and went over to her. “Good morning,” he said. He gave her a kiss.
“ . . . Three, four, five. There.” She was counting out spoons of coffee, but there were tears in her eyes. She looked away from him.
“You look as if you’re about to become head of the Southern Command,” she said. She pulled the milk out of the refrigerator. “You going somewhere?”
“Oh, just a sort of a formal dress thing at headquarters,” he said. He watched the coffee begin to drip. “Some ceremony.”
She looked at him and didn’t continue her questioning. The coffeepot hissed.
“Got any more lemons?” he asked. He smiled faintly.
“No, I don’t,” she said, looking inside the refrigerator. “Someone finished them.” She cast him an accusing look.
She poured a cup of coffee for each of them and they carried their cups carefully down the long hall to the terrace. He remembered what his father had taught him: When you’re carrying a full
cup, don’t look at it or it will spill. His father had learned that lesson serving breakfast in the officers’ mess. It seemed to Doron like a maxim for leading a successful, unexamined life. And better yet, it was true. If you never looked down, the coffee never spilled. But it was hard to resist looking.
He and his mother sat down. It had been a long time since he had seen her with her hair unbrushed and with no makeup at all. Her grayness seemed eerier and more vulnerable when a spear of rising sunlight caught her full in the face. She saw him looking.
She patted his hand.
She wasn’t dying, so why did he feel so sad.
“The thing’s at headquarters in Tel Aviv?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She thought about that for a while.
She looked at the floor and picked absently at the skin around her thumbnail. She ran a fuzzy slipper over the curlicues and arabesques in the old Palestinian floor tiles, making new bright patterns in the dust. Beyond the terrace, palm fronds rustled in the wind like shuffled papers. “You have to face things, sweetheart.”
“I am facing them, Mother. Everything is fine.”
She watched an airplane descending over the desert. Doron watched her watching.
“I’m not getting that feeling.”
“Don’t worry.” He tried to smile.
Her face knotted up.
The old sofa that long ago had been abandoned on the terrace to the Jerusalem weather creaked beneath his shifting weight. The noise was a noise he was used to; if it hadn’t creaked, he would have noticed. The lingering night smell of newly blooming jasmine filled him with a sudden nostalgia for this house when they had just moved into it, this sofa when it was new, for his childhood, his mother when she was young. His father.
“Do you know the story of Gertler, mother?”
She looked at him.
“Gertler? A great, great hero. What do you mean, Ari? Everyone knows the story of Gertler.”
“I don’t mean as prime minister, Mother.”
“Ah, you mean the scandal during the war. Not really, no,” she said. They both gazed at the floor as her toe slid along a maroon swirl. “I don’t know it. I mean, not particularly, really.” She was trying to focus, arising from her bed only to deal with a disappearing son and the old story of Gertler. She picked up her coffee cup. “I mean, I don’t know more than the average person, I suppose. We all respected him so much. Your father, too.” She sipped carefully.
“Yizhar was involved, I remember,” he said. “Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding as if she had just recalled it. “Yes, something like that I remember, too.”
A siren went off in the distance. They both picked up their heads to listen. It faded.
“They said that Gertler was ruined by drink,” she said. “And his friends were not as supportive as they might have been, your father told me. Professional jealousy, I think it was. Now that you mention it, I imagine Yizhar was one of them. Yes, he must have been. He and Gertler were great friends. He was Gertler’s protégé.”
Doron nodded slowly.
“History is history, Ari,” she said. “Character is not immutable. Yizhar is a reputable man. Entirely reputable. I know what you are thinking.”
“Some people never change, Mother.”
“Maybe.” She leaned over and tapped his knee with a forefinger. “Yizhar is not a fool. Maybe he failed to stand by an old friend, back then, but he rescued Gertler, in the end. Yizhar was the one who spoke out for him. Trust him.”
He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
“I have to go out,” she said. “Promise me you’ll come back here after your whatever it is.”
“Of course I will,” he said.
She looked at him and he could see that she knew something was wrong.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Ari. Remember your father.”
“I’m fine, Mother, stop worrying.”
“Remember what Daddy used to say: ‘When in doubt, wait.’ ” She picked up their empty coffee cups.
“And ended up rushing into a bullet and a land mine, so much for waiting,” he said.
She was headed down the long corridor.
“Wait, let me remember,” she said, turning back to him from halfway down the hall. “What was it? Who said it? Let me think, let me think . . . Ben-Gurion? Maybe. Golda?” She stood there in the hallway’s shadows, her voice coming out of the darkness. “Ah, I remember, it was Golda: ‘Heroes can’t always afford to wait and see.’ ”
“So there,” Doron said to her. “So the lesson is: ‘When in doubt, wait, but heroes can’t always afford to wait.’ ” He laughed. “There is a motto for everything and for its opposite, isn’t there?”
She smiled at him.
“The gardener brought the pansies yesterday,” she said. “They look so bright from here. Do you like them?”
He didn’t answer.
“Well, I’m getting dressed,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Doron stood and looked over the side of the terrace. Morning traffic had begun, but it was never very heavy in this neighborhood. A water truck drove by. A few cars were parked on the street, but he recognized all of them. They belonged to the neighbors. He saw the low branches moving on the tree across the street tree. A bird, landing? He heard his mother coming back down the hall.
“What are you looking at?” his mother asked from behind him. He turned around.
“Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing to see down there that I haven’t seen a million times.”
She was wearing her pants suit, and carrying an open bag overflowing with a clipboard, pointer, slides for her presentation, and notes.
They walked into the kitchen together.
“I’ll call a taxi,” she said. She went to the phone. He watched her. The curve of her back, which had thickened with age, seemed vulnerable. He definitely felt regret about what he was about to do, no matter how it turned out. But there was no choice. He was just waiting till the hour was appropriate.
“Promise me you’re coming home later,” she said. She looked at him fiercely.
“I promise, I promise,” he said. He tried to make it sound light, as if he were imitating a young boy annoyed at his mother’s attentions.
“Okay. Okay, then.” She looked away from him because she couldn’t look at him. “I’m going to wait downstairs for the cab.”
“Maybe character is immutable, Mother,” Doron said. “You’ve never changed, for example.”
His mother turned back to him and smiled. “Be careful, Ari,” she said, squeezing his arm. She kissed him goodbye.
She left, and he went back to the terrace to watch for her taxi. She waited just below where he stood; he could see only her head and the tip of the pointer sticking out of the bag. The pots of pansies were still in their crates. A garbage truck was parked in the middle of the street, picking up everything on the block from there. The grocer’s boy passed by with a cardboard box on his shoulder. Across the street, the low branches of the tree moved again.
A cat? Yizhar’s “security detail”? Or what?—the wind?
He could see her taxi stuck behind the garbage truck. The cabby started to honk wildly, and Doron’s mother, hearing the commotion, began walking down the street. She got into the cab and the garbage truck turned the corner, and he saw her hand waving out the taxi’s back window to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AT THE HOSPITAL ENTRANCE, PHILIP turned to George. “Feeling up to it?” he asked. “You never feel up to it, Philip,” George said. “You just do it because you have to.” He nodded at a doctor who walked by and seemed to recognize him.
“I think cardiology is up there,” George said, pointing at a long stairway at the end of the hall. “Marina told me there is a terrible staircase the Israelis have put there as their own peculiar way of showing compassion for the sick and disabled.” Philip started toward it, but George held him back.
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“Let me hold your arm, Philip.” He grasped Philip’s arm with the strength of a vise.
“You know, I’m supposed to consider myself lucky if I’m well enough to climb these stairs and maybe go through another procedure. But it won’t make me feel lucky. Remember the last time?” George stopped their progress for a moment. “I don’t want to feel that way again.”
He breathed deeply. Three Palestinian women were sitting at the base of the stairwell, waiting. A sort of checkpoint, a security check with a metal detector, was set up at the bottom stair, manned by one soldier.
George wanted to run for the exit. The soldier was as good an excuse as any. But he knew he had to face the soldier, face the stairs, face Dr. Simcha Rodef, and submit. George looked at the metal detector.
“Lord,” he said to Philip, sighing.
“This will be fun,” Philip said.
“And just today, I’m feeling pretty well,” George went on, as if neither of them had noticed the coming obstacle. The soldier was looking at them, but of course, he would be looking at anyone who was approaching. George didn’t even want to think about what the next few weeks would bring, if another procedure didn’t simply finish him off right there on the table. Utter exhaustion, susceptibility to infection, disorientation, weakness, panic, and worst of all, the inability to move, and therefore the necessity of remaining in Jerusalem. He walked slowly along, looking down at the speckled stone floor. What if he were to die in Jerusalem?
George thought of Leila’s son; and of Ari Doron. He looked at this soldier here before him: as usual, there was nothing to read in the face. They had illegible faces from a distance, and illegible faces from up close. A boyish face beneath a military beret. The soldier inspected him briefly.
“Yes?” the soldier said, in Hebrew.
“Cardiology,” Philip replied in English.
The soldier nodded.
“Yesh lecha nesheck?” he asked.