Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  Ahmed hated bombs. (Preferred assassinations, kidnappings, hostage takings: anything where some element of strategy and intelligence was involved.) No matter when a bomb went off, it ruined everything. You planned, you negotiated, you waited, you traded and bartered and connived and conceded, and you felt on the brink of something, you were just about to achieve something—it was touch and go, but possible. And then everything was brought down by some dumb fuck zipped into a vest full of TNT. Like an angry child kicking over a game he hadn’t been invited to play. This bombing would ruin the launch of Hill of the World, no doubt. Ahmed had noticed recently that it was always an uncle or a cousin who’d recruited the suicide bombers. He noticed: they never sent their own sons.

  The taxi. Enfin. Of course, this was the moment Rana would choose to push back her hair in that way. For a heartbeat, as her hair blew in the wind and fell back over her shoulder, Ahmed wished the bloody taxi away, and Rana back on the army cot.

  • • •

  GEORGE PEERED OUT the window as the taxi came to a stop. He had not planned on the girl. He hadn’t planned on much at all, in fact. His heart was pounding away like A. Aronson’s jackhammers, and a trickle of blood from Dr. Rodef’s puncture had stained his white shirt. He noticed a large hematoma forming under the bandage; it was the first time the anticoagulant had shown signs of such overenthusiasm, he thought. His own blood made this doctor panicky. He put his coat back on, stepped out of the taxi onto the windblown hill, and told the driver to go. This was the end of things. Up here on this empty hill with the friend of his childhood. If he did it, he did it. If he didn’t, he didn’t. He felt dizzy. Light-headed from the thrumming inside him.

  He was not in a calculating frame of mind, in fact. Unless one could call those fleeting memories that he was having on the ride up here calculations: After all our shared history, you let your cronies try to letter-bomb me, of all things. You exploited my dead grandson and my daughter. To say nothing of selling out the Palestinian people. You never really cared at all, did you?

  Ahmed stood next to the girl. She looked like a child.

  “To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?” Ahmed asked. He had to shout over the wind, because George had not come very close.

  “Just a visit,” George said. He decided to ignore the girl’s presence, and proceed.

  “This is George Raad,” Ahmed said to the girl. “An old friend of mine.” The girl looked at George and smiled. She knew who he was.

  “Come see my tent, George,” Ahmed shouted. His voice sounded cheerfully welcoming, but he looked concerned, and curious. He was barefoot. Just out of bed, George thought.

  “Actually, I wanted to show you something,” George said. He reached into his coat pocket and was gratified to see Ahmed inch backward in anticipation of something bad. George looked up at him and smiled. “You look scared,” he said, moving in closer. “You know, that was a big bomb back there. Did you hear it?”

  He took the gun out of his pocket. He held it hanging at his side. It suddenly looked very big to him.

  Ahmed was looking at it, too.

  “My God,” the girl said. George noticed that she separated herself from Ahmed, rather than move toward him for protection. Smart girl.

  “What’s that for?” Ahmed said.

  George gave a short laugh.

  “A better question is whose is it,” George said. “Don’t you want to know how I got it?”

  “I guess so,” Ahmed said quietly. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at George.

  “It’s Ari Doron’s,” George said.

  Ahmed looked at the gun, processing the name. George watched as he tried to remember. The wind rattled the concertina wire. The girl shivered and drew her little leather jacket tightly around her.

  “The soldier,” Ahmed said, finally.

  “Yes,” George said. “That’s right. The most astonishing thing, really. He came to the hotel and handed me his gun. Loaded—he bothered to inform me.”

  “Why don’t you put it back in your pocket?” Ahmed said.

  “What, and keep it . . . like a souvenir?” George asked.

  “Sure,” Ahmed said, nodding. The girl was over at the edge of the hill now, far enough away but watching the two men. They could hear George’s taxi going back down the hill.

  “But the soldier said I should use it, Ahmed.” George looked at the gun hanging from his hand like an unpleasant artificial limb. “You know, I knew his name all along, Ahmed. My little secret, eh?”

  Ahmed’s face registered no emotion.

  “Let’s go sit down, George, and stop this nonsense,” he said. “We’ll be out of the wind in the tent. Rana will make us coffee.”

  George looked around. Beautiful spot. High and masterful, like Olympus.

  “I have a question for you, Ahmed,” George said.

  “What is your question, George?”

  “It might seem impolite, you know. Propriety disregarded, and all that. Hope you won’t mind?” George gestured with his palms in a questioning manner, but he had the gun in one hand, and Ahmed took another step backward.

  “Get on with it, George.”

  “Why did you let them try to kill me?” He looked at Ahmed. He raised his eyebrows.

  “What?” Ahmed said, pulling his head back and frowning. “Who?”

  “Damascus,” George said.

  Ahmed shrugged.

  “I didn’t let them, George, don’t be a fool,” he said. “Nothing was going to stop them, except their own stupidity and incompetence. Which did stop them, actually.”

  Ah, Ahmed, never at a loss.

  “A friend of my son-in-law’s says you could have stopped them, but that offending them just then would have been inconvenient for you,” George said. “Now, what do you say to that? That sounds just like you, doesn’t it? Has the ring of truth. . . .”

  “I did what I could, George,” Ahmed said. “They certainly didn’t kill you, did they? I mean, here you are, now, playing your little game.”

  “It’s not a game, Ahmed.” George brandished the weapon in a swinging way. It waved in the air very unimpressively, he thought.

  “Oh, put down that stupid thing, will you, please?” Ahmed said.

  George nodded. Ahmed’s face, something about his expression, looked peculiarly diabolical to George. George smiled.

  “You’re enjoying this,” Ahmed said.

  “What do you expect?”

  Ahmed turned his back. His loose white shirt was whipped through with wind. At least this was a more fitting assassin than Sheukhi, Ahmed thought. And this one would never shoot a man in the back. Would he?

  No, this one would simply never shoot a man at all.

  “Don’t you turn your back on me, Amr.” George lifted the gun and pointed it at the small of Ahmed’s back. Was that a good spot to aim for? His doctor’s instinct told him yes. Go for the spine.

  George heard the girl gasp. He must have looked as if he intended to shoot. There, that was something to be proud of. Ahmed turned around. He looked at George and then started slowly toward him.

  George moved back a step. He wanted to keep his distance from Ahmed, who could overpower him so easily.

  “I’m bleeding, did you see?” George said. He shrugged off his coat, switching the gun from hand to hand, and moving backward. He let the coat fall in a heap to the ground. He stuck out his bandaged arm and looked at the mess. It really was quite bloody, his sleeve.

  Ahmed glanced at George’s arm.

  “That looks bad,” he said. He kept approaching, as if to look more closely at the wound.

  “Don’t come any farther, please,” George said. He moved the gun up slightly, aiming at the heart. At least he knew for sure the damage that would do.

  Ahmed stopped.

  Jesus, thought George, shivering. God, it was cold up here.

  “What’s wrong with you, George?” Ahmed asked.

  “I don’t know,” George said. “My heart
is giving out, I think.” He blinked back tears from the stinging wind. His heart was doing strange things. He dropped the arm that held the gun, and he felt the gun hanging there against his leg. For a second he thought, I must look ridiculous; but then the thought was gone.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” Ahmed asked.

  “They took my blood,” George said.

  “Ah.”

  “I’m feeling a little queasy.”

  “You don’t look well at all,” Ahmed said.

  George nodded.

  “Who’s the girl?” he asked.

  “An old friend,” Ahmed said.

  “Ah,” said George. “Another old friend.”

  “Stop this right now, George,” Ahmed said. “You’re scaring her, you’re scaring me, and you’re making a fool of yourself.”

  “ ‘Stop this right now, George,’ ” George said.

  Ahmed shook his head in disgust.

  George raised the gun again. It seemed very heavy now.

  “Put it down,” Ahmed said.

  George did not lower the gun. He coughed. The wind, it was too much. What am I doing here? This is no place for me. He brought the gun back down to his side, and coughed again. Was it going to be one of those coughs? He started to shake. Where was his coat? This was no place for an ill man. I should be in a library somewhere, in my dressing gown, slippers, a little fire glowing in the corner, wooden paneling, dusty shelves, reading glasses, a deep sofa, dog at my feet. Like Ahmed’s father in the study in Amman. Marina bringing tea. Not on this desolate hill.

  “Do you remember your father’s study in Amman?” George asked Ahmed.

  “Yes, I remember it,” Ahmed said. “George, you’re sick.”

  “Yes, I’m sick,” George said. He coughed again. “Of course I’m sick.”

  “Look at your arm.”

  He looked down. The sleeve was soaked in blood.

  “I’m dying,” he said.

  “Well, at any rate, you’re not well.”

  “Look at that,” George said, staring at his sleeve. “It’s like a medical specimen, for Chrissakes.” He looked at the gun in his other hand and suddenly felt the absurdity of his position.

  “Ahmed, Ahmed,” he said. “Take the fucking gun, would you?” He raised the gun and motioned with it to Ahmed. The motion started him coughing again. Ahmed took the gun. The girl came running back to them, now.

  George smiled at her, and the cough began again. It was getting dark. He bent over double with the spasms. Ah, there was his coat, on the ground. He leaned down to pick it up and his heart knocked him over and he felt himself topple.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE TEAM HAD GONE OUT to Ramallah already to question Hajimi and perhaps to rearrest him. What a joke. As if he would say anything. As if he knew anything. Yizhar sat in a corner of the Thai noodle shop, nursing a Diet Coke. He’d thought he would eat, but he’d discovered as he entered the shop that the idea of feeding himself was repugnant. The smells emanating from behind the counter seemed muddy, rotten, and sickly sweet. Normal people would say that this aversion might come from the fact that he had just walked down Jaffa Road through what was left of the debris of the latest bombing—the glass shards, splintered wood, and crumbled concrete, the red metal scraps of bus, and the black blood splashed across the silver pedestrian barricades and staining the roadbed. But Yizhar was used to all that. The Thais remained miraculously intact among the wreckage, like a mirage, like something the hand of God had protected—probably because they were not Jews.

  No, the revulsion was caused by something less palpable. He couldn’t quite isolate it, but he knew that it had something to do with himself, a deep disgust with himself. Not for being pragmatic and self-serving and aggressive and obsessively secretive—it was very bad to know these things about yourself, but he thought that overall, these were good attributes. No, he was angry because he had been stupid. All his mistakes. Everything he could have done to prevent what had happened. His first mistake, not letting that woman speed right through with her sick baby. He saw himself clearly on that night, a literal-minded, authoritarian bureaucrat, out-of-touch, talking on the secure phone at his old decaying desk, and he hated that man because he had gotten the real Yizhar—brilliant strategist, clever operator, and patriot—into a difficult situation. He remembered feeling this turning of the stomach once before, when he realized that he was the one who had saved Gertler’s career, and thereby had guaranteed his own eternal service on a secondary rung.

  His stomach was churning up its ugly juices. Question Hajimi! Rearrest him! Another idiotic ploy. Another sham. As if Hajimi had anything to do with Doron’s disappearance. Hajimi was a Hamas nut, and probably a terrorist, but he wasn’t a fool. You don’t leave your victim’s car outside your house. They were going to question Hajimi on two counts: Doron’s disappearance, which no one but the chiefs of staff and a few key operatives knew about yet, and the bus bombings, both of which Yizhar highly doubted Hajimi had anything to do with. It just seemed convenient to take one guy in for everything at once. The checkpoints would go crazy.

  In any case, Hajimi wouldn’t exactly be sitting there in his living room waiting for them to come chat. If he realized what had happened—and of course, he would realize it—Hajimi would already be in hiding somewhere in East Jerusalem, and he’d wait until the whole thing blew over. The smart guys always did. There was always a dark little mildewed room in the back of some crumbling medieval heap, and some deviant asshole waiting to take a guy like Hajimi in.

  Publicly, Yizhar was busy blaming the bombings—and anything else that might happen—on a “rogue Hamas element.” (He was proud of that phrase, “rogue” and “Hamas” in the same sentence as if that were not redundant, implying, too, that the nonrogue faction of Hamas, the not-as-bad Hamas faction, was somehow a wing of the Authority. . . .) A “rogue” element doing evil deeds on its own recognizance—that concept kept the Authority clean, and meant that the Israelis could leave their eager, bright-eyed little Foreign Ministry youngsters at the table with the Authority, yap-yapping, and get the process over with.

  As if that could ever be. Endings did not happen here. Things did not come to a close, even on the rare occasions when they seemed to. In the Holy Land, you could haggle for a century or two over an inch of unusable land, and really mean it. Yizhar stood and looked at the steaming noodle counter again, but he could not rouse his appetite. He walked blindly out into the grim sunlight of shattered Jaffa Road. Let’s be honest. Here was another unsavory aspect of his unfolding character: he felt just the tiniest bit of relief that Doron had disappeared. Oh, the tiniest, but definite. As long as the boy did not reappear on a Gaza podium next to the Chairman, and denounce the State of Israel and its duplicitous agent, Daniel Yizhar, Yizhar was not unhappy to see him go.

  If the things that had occurred between Yizhar and Doron—the discussions, the arguments, the near scuffles—had happened between men of good faith, no one would ever have been the wiser, because there were secret battles that like-minded friends fought that they never revealed to another soul. It turned out, however, that Doron was another case entirely. Yizhar had made the mistake of believing that he and the soldier were on common ground. He had looked at the open face and the uniform and thought: We are both a part of the same army. But he had been wrong. In fact, although Yizhar hadn’t understood it at the time, he and Doron were fighting over that one inch of unusable land. It made Yizhar want to punch things, this mistake of a lifetime, this second serious mistake of an entire career. It made him furious. Even though the soldier had brought his fate on himself at every point, Yizhar felt that his own standing and his reputation for handling things were undermined by the soldier’s conduct. The jerk even paid for his own gas and drove his own car straight into a trap in Ramallah.

  Yizhar wanted to want to be the kind of person who said, Let the right thing be done. He was capable of understanding that he should want to be good, pure. He wanted to
be able to think to himself, Better that I be destroyed than that any harm come to this uncorrupted, upstanding boy. He wished he were capable of actually entertaining such thoughts. But he wasn’t. He couldn’t do it, not with sincerity. That kind of correctness was beyond him, and thank the Lord for that. That was turn-the-other-cheek crap. He pushed open the glass doors of The Building. Behind the huge plate-glass window of the public conference room near the elevator bank, old men in strange hats were doing jumping jacks—some old labor-union club, Yizhar assumed, supported by government subsidies, of course. He caught the scent of the chicken soup the men would be having for their lunch. It smelled like baby oil and old garlic and turned schnapps. He pressed the up button and waited. What mattered was that it was better for Yizhar—and better for Israel, he reminded himself—if a boy like this just disappeared.

  Yizhar had explained the problem in general terms to the Defense Minister, and the Defense Minister had understood. Whatever was said publicly, the security forces wouldn’t be pushing too hard too soon for Doron’s rescue. No commando forces rushing into Ramallah in hot pursuit. And Yizhar didn’t feel particularly bad about it—he didn’t feel remorse about the Hajimi baby’s death, didn’t feel in the least guilty, and he didn’t feel bad about Doron’s disappearance. He just didn’t.

  Still, the familiar creeping nausea followed him as he entered the elevator. It was the nausea you felt when fate might be going against you—fear catching you in the stomach. Yizhar got out on his floor. Maybe he was just holding his breath until he heard that the soldier had been killed, and then his cramps would ease. He opened his office door; he must have done it quietly, because there was Irit, with her feet on the desk and a bucket of soup in her lap, slurping away as happily as a puppy and chatting on the telephone.