Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  “What is he saying?” George asked Philip.

  Philip looked at the soldier and cocked his head.

  The soldier patted his own pockets.

  “Vepins. Do you have any vepins?” the soldier asked, this time in English.

  “Hah!” George burst out. He could not restrain himself. Weapons. If only, he thought.

  “No,” Philip answered.

  “Go up, then,” the soldier said, gesturing toward the stairs.

  • • •

  DR. RODEF’S OFFICE was in a side hall on the cardiology floor. All hospitals are the same, George thought as he walked down the soundproofed linoleum and fluorescent corridor. Philip opened Rodef’s office door. They walked in and George briefly gauged the quality of the reading material—old magazines from the Hebrew newspapers, scattered over a corner glass table—before lowering himself into a chrome and plastic chair. Philip spoke with a receptionist who sat behind a standard-issue Formica counter, and then he came to stand next to George, like a sentry.

  “We’re next,” he said. Dr. Rodef had tried to cheer things up with Gauguin prints, but the succulent foliage seemed stunningly out of place in the heart of the heart ward in the depths of Hadassah, up here on a forlorn hilltop overlooking the desert.

  This was not a place for the lighthearted. George sank into his uncomfortable chair. He felt right at home. He always felt comfortable on any cardiology floor; it was his turf, after all. But now, more so. Ever since his own personal heart attack, he felt an otherworldly calm descend on him when he was in the heart department. His nerves, his fears about his condition, vanished. It was as if he had finally arrived at his destination, finally he was home, and he could relax. Someone, something, had been following him his whole life, he felt, and here on the cardiology floor, he’d met the man face-to-face. There was horror involved in knowing your own fate, of course, horror because the fellow you’d met face-to-face happened to be carrying a loaded—what was that blunt Hebrew word? Nesheck, that was it—a loaded weapon and was quite prepared to fire it. But there was also the relief of recognition. Oh, then, this is it! Meeting your fate has its advantages, he thought, looking at the Tahitian girl under the palm. She gazed back with flat eyes.

  • • •

  DR. RODEF was taking blood. George watched it flow away. He had the funny little sensors of an electrocardiogram glued to his chest.

  “Just a test,” the doctor said, smiling at him, pulling one vial off the needle and sticking on another. Behind the doctor’s head was a brightly colored poster explaining the components of blood. In this version, plasma looked particularly forbidding. “Just a test,” he repeated.

  “Yup,” George said. He felt as if he were losing something precious. “Looks pretty red,” he said in a chipper voice.

  “Yes, it does,” Rodef said. He smiled. “The EKG looks good.”

  George watched the needle going up and down.

  “So we’ll just have to see, as you know,” Rodef said.

  Why do doctors have to be so bloody honest all the time?

  As you know. That’s what irritated him. As if somehow he were implicated in the disgusting physical crisis that was destroying him. He looked up at the poster as the doctor attached yet another vial. Ah, the cells: B and T lymphocytes and all the little thrombocytes; the neutrophil and eosinophil; and let us not forget the blasts: the myeloblast, the monoblast, and the wiggly red proerythroblast. Lovely important little beggars. Why couldn’t they just flow nicely through the chambers, doing their work like good boys and girls. Why couldn’t his heart behave?

  He looked at the huge fleshy model of a heart—with its four removable chambers—that stood on the countertop.

  Traitor! Defector! Collaborator! George winced as the doctor removed the needle.

  “There you are, then,” Dr. Rodef said, removing his gloves. “Results as soon as possible.” He smiled the disturbingly smug smile of the man whom you suspect knows more about you than you do. George exhaled and closed his eyes.

  Zaire you ahr, zen, he thought.

  • • •

  PHILIP LEFT HIM at poolside with a drink. At poolside with a drink. Had a nice ring to it, but unfortunately, it was off-season. The pool was empty, the air was cold, and the drink was a tall glass of water. George stuck his feet out. He was always horizontal at the wrong time of day: at midmorning in Dr. Rodef’s office, and now, again, at lunchtime here at the hotel. Was it a function of his illness or just being, as he supposed he could now theoretically consider himself, on vacation? Here in Palestine, he was on vacation from his real life as a doctor and an American, though no sane person could call this place vacationland.

  Beyond the wall that separated the hotel and the adjacent mosque from Nablus Road, the cranes of the new Jerusalem were busy. The builders were counting on peace—Ahmed’s peace, as George thought of it—to bring some kind of prosperity to the city, and tourists who would thrill to the tragedies of the Holy Land, the crucifixions, the beheadings, the sieges and massacres, all the martyrdoms, the bombings, death all around. George supposed it was amusing—“interesting,” as Philip would say—for them to get a feel for it and then go home to a normal place. Blood was clearly a draw here in Holylandia. The fronds of the poolside palm trees snapped in the wind.

  All over town, but especially up here near the Old City, where the Jewish side touched the Palestinian side, hotel construction was at a record high. George hated those cranes; they were like mindless birds pecking away at what he considered his property. The contours of Jerusalem were disappearing beneath the new edifices: archway, stone, pilaster and balustrade, cornice and lintel, rampart and pinnacle, all sinking down beneath what was new. It was like an archaeological dig in reverse. George sipped his water and watched the dance of the cranes. So slow, so graceful, the elegant cross of the vertical and the horizontal, turning and turning. A. Aronson was the name of the contractor, his enormous signs were on all the equipment. Oh, A. Aronson, you know not what you do. George shook his head. Then again, possibly A. Aronson is quite aware . . .

  Explosions set to carve out foundations for a farther hotel rocked the ground briefly. Dig with quiet little shovels in Jerusalem, A. Aronson, George thought. Do not disturb the public peace of mind with the sound of bombs, fool. The elevator pulley moved slowly across the shaft and he watched as the nearest crane rotated and the elevator with its load of men and brick rose up, up toward the half-done roof of the new Nova Hotel. Kkk, kkk, kkk. Each notch along the crane’s tower clicked as the elevator rose. The cranes were dancing over George’s head with outstretched arms.

  A. Aronson was winning. Farewell, Jerusalem, George thought. The traitors and collaborators are handing history over to the cranes. The spot where the needle had gone in ached, and blood was seeping around it. Damned blood thinner. George grimaced in pain as he raised his glass to the twirling dancers. L’chaim, he thought. It was one of his few Hebrew phrases. To life. His heart wriggled inside him like a caught insect as he raised his glass of water. The palpitations generated a feeling of panic without any external cause for fear.

  As he lowered his glass once more, George heard the metallic sound that a coin makes, falling on tile. He looked down next to his lounge chair and saw that the skeleton key to the old house had dropped from his pocket. Aha! He reached down for it. You don’t get away so easily, mister, he thought. He held the key up to the sunlight. After all these years with no lock to unfasten, it was still remarkably shiny and bright from the touch of his hand and his father’s. George put it back deep in his pocket. As a conjuring tool, it was useless now, after all he had seen today at Lovers of Zion Street. But George wasn’t ready to part with it just yet. Not just yet. After all, it had only been, oh, forty years or so. . . . Leave it here on the ground, discarded? Unthinkable. He would give it to Marina. He imagined its reception. Thanks, Dad, she would say, with that gently skeptical tone in her voice and that little ironic smile on her face, both inherited from him, just
like the key and so many other catastrophes. From the minaret nearby, he heard the crackle of a recording and then, louder than dynamite, the call to prayer. The water was cool as he drank it down. He listened to the anonymous voice chant praise for Allah and his Messenger. Tiny men in blue began unloading boxes of bricks onto the Nova roof. George watched them pile the neat cubes in a corner. Over the new foundations in the distance, puffs of smoke and dust clouded the low air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  NO LEAVING BEFORE LUNCHTIME. IT would be too early. Afternoon would be good. Doron might catch Marina alone. He hoped so, because since Hajimi had been released, Doron had developed a sincere concern about the man. He had no idea what Hajimi might do, but he was sure he would do something.

  Doron had one stop to make before Ramallah. He washed the coffee cups, and stood at the sink, letting the water run. He shut his eyes and listened to its clean sound, like rivers and laundry. The soap smelled good. Who was downstairs waiting for him? Maybe he should slip out over the side terrace, whip through the neighbor’s backyard, and hide in the Jerusalem forest. He would eat berries and sleep on a bed of pine needles.

  He shook himself out of his reverie, and went to sit on the terrace, waiting for the sun to move up in the sky. Every once in a while, he stood and looked at the tree across the street. It seemed that the later it got, the less it moved. He was probably imagining it. He lay on the couch on the terrace and dozed briefly, wakened suddenly by a sonic boom that was distinguishable from a bomb only by the telltale sound of plane engines after the boom cracked. He looked at his watch. Almost time. His uniform felt stiff and proper. He was going to soil it irrevocably in the eyes of Yizhar and perhaps the rest of his countrymen, but there was no turning back. He remembered the friendly tone of Yizhar’s voice from last night, when he called that number from the military phone. “Yes? What is it?” Such a nice voice.

  “What is it?”

  It’s me, it’s me. It’s the end.

  Doron went back into his bedroom and opened the closet. He knew what he would find on the shelf in the back, and there it was, in the shoe box he’d put it in after the night at the checkpoint. The way he’d felt after the boy’s funeral, he had never wanted to see the gun again, but now he wanted it. He stuck it in his belt. He went back into the kitchen and rummaged around under the sink until he found his mother’s stash of plastic grocery bags. He stuffed one into his pocket. There.

  He pulled his beret down to shade his eyes as he opened the side door. From the landing, all he could see were the tops of trees and the empty street. He ran down the outside stairs. When he got to the bottom, he opened the shelter gate quickly and looked around: nothing, no one. No cat, even. He felt ridiculous, but he assumed that that was to be his permanent state. He opened the cold car door and closed it fast, locking it immediately, although he wasn’t sure the lock locked. He looked over the seat back to make sure no one was there, hiding. He sat panting behind the wheel.

  They know who you are. Doron remembered Yizhar’s hooded olive eyes as he said it. He looked out the window toward the tree across the street. Nothing. A cold chill tiptoed up his spine. So what if they’re watching me? he told himself, not very convincingly. He felt his pockets for the car keys. The next-door neighbors have a cat. It was the cat. He was suddenly afraid to start his car. His stomach tightened as he pulled the key away from the ignition. He sat there, just sitting, listening. He heard wind in the trees, and beyond that, nothing. Then he heard ticking. He straightened in fear. Ticking, he thought. Another cliché. But he definitely heard it. Did bombs still tick? He doubted it. He leaned his head back and put his arms behind his neck, trying to relax. The ticking grew louder.

  It was his Swatch! Of course. The damned thing! Limor or Noa had bought it for him, but Tamara said it made more noise than Big Ben; she couldn’t stand the ticking. Doron never noticed. His ugly Swatch, with its shiny face and metallic band—he loved the thing right now. God, he loved it! He tapped it with a finger and laughed at himself. The ticking was solid and strong. Once you’d heard it, you kept hearing it. That’s what Tamara said, and it turned out she was right. He started his car.

  • • •

  THERE HE GOES. Mahmoud watched Lieutenant Ari Doron come down the stairs. They had a good view of the house and the parking shelter from the side street where they had been waiting.

  “Look, Uncle, he’s in his car.” Jibril pointed, just noticing.

  “Thanks,” Mahmoud said. And it was lucky he had come down now, and not much later, because they were getting bored and sleepy. And hungry. They’d eaten their last food just before sunrise, and had arrived here in time to see the soldier drive up in that thing he called a car. For the past five hours, they had only left the car to piss against a wall behind a tree. As Doron pulled out of the shelter and began heading up the street, Mahmoud put his car in gear, stepped on the gas, and heard a terrible grinding noise. The car trembled and died. He’d forgotten the clutch again. The soldier was cruising down Kakal.

  “He’s already getting away,” Jibril hissed.

  “Stay calm, Jibril,” Mahmoud said.

  “I think he’s looking back at us,” Jibril said.

  “He’s not looking at us,” Mahmoud said. “Please.”

  He tried the fancy footwork again. This time he remembered how to do it. With a lurch, their car agreed to go forward. He turned onto Kakal and followed Doron. Mahmoud had never owned a car, and had rarely driven. The car he had rented for today was a nameless piece of repaired tin that cost ten dollars a day. He’d got it from a friend who’d rented it for seven dollars a day from another friend. Mahmoud had done a visual comparison early that morning, and decided that his car was in even worse condition than the soldier’s.

  One good thing, though, and the thing that kept the friend’s friend in business, was that the car had yellow Israeli plates instead of blue West Bank plates. It meant that you could go anywhere in the car. Yes, yes, you risked a stoning on the West Bank if people didn’t look hard before they threw their rocks, if they assumed you were Israeli—but still the plates were invaluable once you were inside Israel. They added one more positive element to the package Mahmoud had put together to get himself and his nephew across the checkpoint this morning.

  He had taken every measure available. He and Jibril had both shaved off their moustaches in order to appear less threateningly Palestinian, because it was well known that the Israelis thought any youngish man with a moustache was a probable terrorist. In the backseat, they had stowed Adnan’s wife and her sister and their mother, all three of whom had Jerusalem passes. Women, especially sainted grandmas, provided additional authentication of innocence. Men with wives were also considered a less likely threat than single men. A valid Jerusalem pass could come in handy, though it could also be ignored, if the soldiers felt like it. A granny’s pass was less likely to be challenged than anyone else’s. And, oh, if only you could get some small children on the bandwagon, that was even better, but Mahmoud had looked around, and none was available. They were all in school, for heaven’s sake, when they could have been making themselves useful.

  “This is easy,” Jibril said, as they drove down Kakal. He giggled nervously. He checked under the attaché case at his feet. There were the handcuffs, borrowed from a friend who worked for the section of the Chairman’s security force that occasionally employed Jibril. Under the handcuffs, the knife.

  “This part is easy,” Mahmoud said. The knife made him edgy. He was glad that the women had already been dropped off at Damascus Gate to go shopping.

  Where was this nut of a soldier going? That’s what Mahmoud wanted to know. He seemed to be headed right into Palestinian territory. Just as well, from Mahmoud’s point of view, but pretty weird for an Israeli soldier.

  What? Turning right here? The man was heading for East Jerusalem! Mahmoud didn’t understand, but then he saw it. The American Colony Hotel. Mahmoud quickly decided to park the car on the little road across
from the hotel’s driveway, in front of the work sites for the new hotels. He certainly wasn’t going to risk anything here in this hornet’s nest of security guys and undercover people and UN forces. It was way too public and international. He’d probably end up getting interviewed by CNN with the cuffed soldier standing behind him, or something.

  “What are we doing?” Jibril asked.

  “We’ll just wait,” said Mahmoud. “I don’t think he’s checking in.”

  Jibril laughed. He jiggled his foot under the attaché case again and drummed his long fingers on the black rubber of the car’s window frame.

  • • •

  DORON WALKED INTO the lobby of the American Colony Hotel. He’d heard about the place—den of iniquity was the consensus among his friends, on those rare occasions when the hotel happened to come up in conversation. Filled with Israel bashers, hatching their evil plots. But he didn’t buy anyone’s propaganda anymore. The butt of his gun was biting into his back. He tried to adjust it, but it kept pinching.

  The hotel was conveniently located down the street from Orient House, the unacknowledged Jerusalem headquarters of the Authority. That was the beauty of it for the Palestinians. They could sneak away from what Doron assumed were their ugly warrens of renovated offices inside beautiful old Orient House and go have a long lunch at the hotel, consort with foreign women, be toasted, feel classy and important, maybe even powerful for a few minutes. He understood. Doron had counseled the police on security for one of the Israeli demonstrations against Orient House last year; he had passed by the hotel in his Humvee, but never gone in. Never even thought about going in.

  He had felt odd in his Palestinian wardrobe in Ramallah, but here, in full Israeli uniform with a few medals pinned on and his service pistol visibly tucked into his belt, he felt like some kind of towering monster. Why was he taller than everyone in the lobby? He had made himself into an object of scrutiny, derision, and fear. He wanted it, though—he wanted to be as much of an Israeli soldier as was possible, and he had done it. The men and women milling around seemed like figures seen from a great height, pea-sized and alien. They were carrying dolls’ accessories, tiny briefcases and little cups of coffee, and they smoked magical cigarettes: how could anything so small actually be lit, and send off smoke? He saw his immense hands hanging at his sides as he gazed down on the women, who wore little Barbie high heels and seemed to teeter. Did he hear these miniature beings talking? They made a continuous squeaking sound in his ears, like mice at a cocktail party.