Martyrs’ Crossing

by Amy Wilentz

  Other people were happy, Yizhar thought.

  She looked up, saw him, promptly removed her feet from the desk, and then proceeded to extricate herself, with as much dignity as possible in the circumstances, first from her telephone call and then from her bucket of soup. Yizhar stood in front of her desk, his arms folded over his stomach, considering her embarrassment. She was showing the tender line of flesh again. Thank you for the entertainment, Irit. The smell of her snack made his stomach turn over. How she would thrill to a televised denunciation of her boss!

  He strode into his office and shut the door crisply. He glanced over his newspapers again and looked at his memos and checked his messages. So far, no one had claimed responsibility for Doron’s disappearance, and no one had demanded anything yet in exchange for his release. In the language of terror, these were accepted indicators that the soldier was already dead. Still, Yizhar would appreciate a body. In a ditch, by the side of the road, in the wadi, under an overpass, wherever. Just give me that one final proof.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THEY’D PUT HIM IN THE car. Big hands liked to show bravado—he was shoving and pushing, but the older guy was different. Doron knew that the older guy, who seemed oddly familiar, was the real threat. Old Guy thought he was clever, driving around with Doron pushed down on the floor of the car, driving all over Ramallah to try and confuse him about his whereabouts. The boy kept his feet on Doron’s back. But when they’d finally came to a stop, Doron knew exactly where he was. Downtown Ramallah, in a cramped parking lot behind one of those dirty office buildings. It was unmistakable from the noises of the traffic and pedestrians, and the smell of diesel and za’tar.

  His captors had jumped from the car, and hauled him out, talking to each other the whole time in undertones Doron could barely hear, much less understand. He stumbled as they pulled him over a rubble-strewn lot to a back staircase. Going up the crumbling stairs in a blindfold was terrifying until he realized that if he looked straight down he could see the broken edge of each stair as he climbed. The younger one held Doron by his cuffed hands as he pushed the soldier up the stairs from behind, and it felt like the grip of friendship, as Doron went blindly up.

  Old Guy was fiddling with a key when Doron and Big Hands reached the landing, and he muttered when it wouldn’t turn in the lock. Doron heard the keys clink together. Then the swoop of the door opening. They shouldered him into a room, pushed him down on the floor, and chained his handcuffs to something. Then they removed his blindfold.

  Chained to a desk. Doron was surprised it wasn’t a bedstead or a radiator, which was the cliché if you knew about hostage takers. An office desk was very difficult to pull through a door frame by yourself, though, so it was a good enough device. But a radiator was even better, because it was fastened to the floor. Doron looked at the radiator from his vantage point at the side of the desk, and thought, Well, these are pretty good conditions, considering.

  He tried to decide, from down on the curling linoleum, whether he was glad or scared to be having this last adventure. Scared. Well, he was not going to escape from this place. Escape was an impossibility. He wouldn’t even attempt it. This was his trial, right here on the floor in Ramallah. Finally, they had found the soldier, but only when he had stuck himself in front of them and said, Here I am. Sit here chained to this desk for a century, maybe then you’ll have done penance, he thought. Being a good person and regretting the harm you have inflicted does not relieve you of your guilt. Zvili, who was not a good person, could walk around saying to himself, Too bad the kid died. So could Yizhar. Doron wondered whether Yizhar cared at all, really, that Ibrahim had died. Yizhar probably said to himself: There were valid security reasons. He wondered if Yizhar knew that these guys—Doron would call Old Guy and Big Hands clowns, except that they had done a brave thing—he wondered if Yizhar knew they had kidnapped his pesky little soldier.

  • • •

  OLD GUY WANTED to execute him, that much was clear. Doron watched Old Guy sitting on a folding chair a couple of feet away from the desk to which Doron was attached. He was holding the blade of his knife against the flat of his palm. He seemed to be using it as a mirror. Just studying his reflection. Couldn’t see much of himself with the bandana around the bottom of his face, though. After a while, the two men removed their face coverings.

  Old Guy played with his knife. He looked over at Doron, imagining, debating how to do it, Doron thought. Imagining where to stick the blade, between the ribs, but where exactly? If you hadn’t done it ever, it was hard to know how to do it efficiently, even if you had a victim who was trussed and couldn’t do much to defend himself.

  Doron could tell him what to do if he would just ask. He’d learned how to wield a knife in special-forces training. Just stick it right up against the spot between the ribs and then shove up and to your right. That should do it, pretty handily, Doron recalled. That would be the easiest way. Big Hands was pacing the room, occasionally flicking on the television to watch news of the bus bombings in Jerusalem, then flicking it off again with a curse. The kid was nervous and the stress made him impatient and angry.

  Doron knew from the minute it began that this was an amateur adventure, not anything big or well planned or controlled by Iran or run by Hamas. Hamas would have killed him immediately, and then let the Israelis stew, wondering whether their soldier were still alive. The guys Iran managed would have taken him on a much longer and more professional ride, and then used him in some hostage-bargaining deal. In both cases, the car would probably have run better. In both cases, no one would be sitting around, looking at a blade.

  It bothered Doron that Old Guy was always looking at him as if they knew each other. It was weird. Oh, yes, and they did, Doron finally realized. That’s who he was: the fellow at the checkpoint, minus the moustache. Troublemaker. What had Yizhar said? A lawyer from Ramallah, the name was too hard to remember. Lawyer kidnaps soldier. Doron tried to make his face as empty as possible; he didn’t want the man to know he’d been recognized. The fellow had an itchy trigger finger, Doron felt, but fortunately, no gun.

  • • •

  MAHMOUD WAS THINKING. It was hard to think with the guy on the floor, there. He looked at his own reflection in the wide blade of the knife. He knew those eyes. They were his own, and very like his brother’s. Mahmoud wasn’t an old man, or a man whose life should be over. But if he did what he meant to do . . .

  He pictured it: that was easy. Ahmed Amr, bored of toying with the soldier, tells his Israeli pals that Mahmoud is probably the kidnapper. Or Ruby Horowitz figures things out. She goes to the Israeli authorities. One way or another, hit squads surround Adnan’s house. They don’t find Mahmoud there, inshallah, but they take Adnan in for questioning, which means a brutal interrogation for his brother, who has no idea what Mahmoud and his own firstborn, beloved son Jibril are up to. Mahmoud meanwhile is hiding in the rundown East Jerusalem apartment of some friend of Jibril’s. He pictured a very uncomfortable bed, a bad place to spend your last nights. Bad food, day after day. Poor plumbing. Endless boredom, while his luck lasts. And then the team of elite commandos descends. Imagine the wrath of the army after he’s murdered one of their own. He imagines it. They won’t arrest him and Jibril. They’ll kill them and call it a “work accident,” that’s their phrase for it: they claim you died when the bomb you were making accidentally exploded. And there are no further questions.

  Yet Mahmoud felt his whole life was leading up to this. It was right and honorable to kill the soldier. Any Israeli soldier deserved to die, and this wretch most of all, because he had murdered that poor little boy. Mahmoud knew. The guy had stood there chatting on the phone while the boy suffocated to death in front of them all. Mahmoud saw it all, up to a point, and he did not need to know more. More didn’t matter. Israeli soldiers humiliated Palestinians every day all day, and they killed you with their rubber bullets, and they kept the whole fucking Palestinian population in prisons and refugee camps, and this soldier
deserved to die.

  He put the knife flat against Doron’s stomach. The pig was sleeping. Sleeping as if he had a clean conscience. I could gut him now, now, while he’s asleep. The uniform with its little proud epaulettes incensed Mahmoud. This guy is so pleased to be representing the oppressor, the usurper. He looked at the soldier’s face, made innocent and vulnerable by sleep. The lieutenant’s mouth was open, and his breath came quietly and regularly, like a child’s. But he was not a child. He was a soldier. Mahmoud lay his knife against the sleeping man’s throat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CAREFUL OF THE IV,” AHMED warned from in front of the window. Marina and Philip were turning George in his hospital bed. George’s feet protruded from beneath the sheet as they lifted him. The skin on the top of his feet was delicate and thin, and on the bottom, callused, his toenails yellowish. Sad, cold feet. Marina covered them. Their vulnerable condition after so much use seemed to her to sum up the whole history of her father’s life. The idea that he could be so passive, that she was in charge of him. He was heavy. They straightened him; Philip held his head up while Marina fluffed his pillow. Philip laid him back down, and Marina arranged him. He looked like a king, still. She pushed his hair back from his forehead. He sighed.

  The doctors had been pitiless. A massive heart attack, and internal bleeding from the anticoagulant George had been taking for so long, they told Marina, Philip, and Ahmed. His brain function was minimal, his heart was a fluttering, stuttering wreck. Dr. Raad was, in their opinion, really too far gone for any kind of treatment. Sometimes it happened like this, suddenly. In a way, it was a blessing. Let him go, they advised. It won’t take long. We’ll give him drugs in case he is feeling any pain, which we doubt.

  Death is like this. Marina remembered her mother’s death, that same feeling of paralysis and inability, combined with the need to be very organized, very efficient, and totally responsible. Back then, she had taken charge of her father. Now, there was nothing left to take charge of.

  George lifted his left arm and turned his wrist toward his face. This had been his only movement since he arrived at the hospital yesterday evening. The doctors told her it was a primitive motor reflex, that it was meaningless. But she couldn’t help thinking he was trying to see what time it was. His eyes were closed. She kept whispering in his ear. She imagined that Philip and Ahmed thought she was saying things like Daddy, I love you, when in fact she was merely informing him that it was five in the evening.

  • • •

  THE WHOLE VALLEY lay below them. Ahmed had never realized what a good view Hadassah Hospital had of the Arab villages that tumbled down the side of Mount Scopus. He recalled that the Palestinians used to ambush Zionist caravans taking doctors and nurses up here, and now he understood why: the hospital site was a prime military redoubt. From this place, you could see everything. He wished he could discuss it with George.

  Ahmed looked over at the bed. Friend of my childhood, farewell. He had grabbed George when he fell, and Rana’s taxi had arrived just a few frightening minutes later, and they’d sped George into Jerusalem—a trip that had no checkpoints, luckily. Ahmed had held George in his arms like a baby.

  He sat down heavily on the windowsill. Marina looked vacantly toward him. She is so like her father, Ahmed thought. He recalled little George blinded by tears as he watched the Amrs packing to leave Jerusalem back during the Catastrophe. The tears, of course, were not because George was going to miss me, Ahmed thought, but because he realized that my fate would soon be his. He remembered George in his short pants, watching Ahmed’s father and Mohammed, the houseboy, load box after box of books into the back of the open truck that took the Amrs and the Nassars to Amman. Those were precarious days—and so are these, my friend. He looked at George’s hands which lay lifeless on the white sheets. A strip of black Hebrew print down the side of the sheet, next to George’s right hand, read HADASSAH HOSPITAL, JERUSALEM. Ahmed smiled. George would laugh at the absurd idea of patients’ stealing the sheets.

  • • •

  PHILIP TURNED ON the television. Marina looked up. More scenes from the bus bombings. Apparently, the reporters had got hold of a new piece of videotape. Israelis always seemed to have a videocamera and a cell phone on hand whenever something happened. She watched as people on the street scattered and the camera’s shocked lens bounced up to film the roofs and then down to film the moving pavement as the camera’s owner also fled from the explosion. The hospital room had gone entirely motionless and silent except for the blip of George’s monitor and the jumble of noise from the television. They were all transfixed. A doctor came in, looked at George and the television, and went out. The camera’s eye righted itself again and people started running toward the burning buses. They were pulling on arms and legs that stuck out of the windows and doors, trying to free those who were stuck inside, before they burned. Marina closed her eyes for a second. She looked again. Limbs and other unidentifiable blown-apart things littered the street. A baby was screaming in a policeman’s arms.

  “Dah,” Ahmed said, quietly.

  Philip winced.

  Marina forced herself to think: One, the Enemy; two, they are not innocent; three, an occupied people is justified in striking civilians; four, they stole our land and killed our children. She heard Hassan’s voice, making all the arguments, the way he used to. The baby was screaming and his face was wounded, she could see now. Passersby were leaning over the victims on the pavement, holding their heads, talking to them. Ambulances had arrived, with stretchers and emergency workers running crazily around in white-and-orange uniforms. It looked like a battleground. This is a battleground, Hassan would say. It’s been going on for a hundred years. They do it to us, also.

  • • •

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO her father, she thought now, she was still leaving. Soon after Hassan had disappeared out the back door into the dark, carrying his sad little bag and looking too thin and too young and too bent under the weight of all his worries, Philip appeared at the front door, with the Uno idling, and his bad news, and now here she was. Marina watched the television screen. The policeman handed the screaming child to a nurse who disappeared from view off to the right.

  “We’ll just turn it off, shall we?” Philip said.

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s okay.” Philip had immediately started to sound like her father.

  “But it’s upsetting you,” he said.

  “Oh, Philip,” she said. “Everything upsets me. Leave it on.” She wanted to say: I need to see it. It reminded her of everything, all her reasons for leaving. Before, she would never have watched it, and would have dismissed all of Their suffering as richly deserved. Now, she knew. The men who were involved in history wanted to argue that this was one way to change how the world worked. They just simply did not care about a baby’s bleeding face, if it wasn’t their own baby. She was leaving.

  She smoothed the sheet next to her father’s hand and watched as the television reporter in his fresh clothes talked into his shiny microphone while behind him the chaos was continuing to unfold. It was Hassan’s politics that had put Ibrahim on a list, and once she had realized that, she knew she would never recover from it. Hassan Hajimi had believed and spoken and acted, and then Marina and Ibrahim Hajimi were on a list, and then her baby was dead. You could go back forever to decide which side’s claims were legitimate, back into the darkest history for a millennium, at least. Hassan would always blame the Zionists. Marina lifted George’s hand and held it. It was cool and dry.

  We all agree, but in the end, so what? What if we win? If you could establish a utopia on earth at the expense of the eternal suffering of one child and its mother—even a Zionist child and its mother—then Marina did not want that utopia. She wanted to be in a place where nothing mattered very much and nothing was worth it, and no one had to make any final sacrifices. She wanted to remove herself from history. She knew she was lucky to have the ability to flee, and only wished, bitterly wished, tha
t she had done it before. She could have escaped—instead, she had returned. Returned to Ramallah. What had she been thinking? Daddy’s fault, she thought again, for glorifying The Cause and romanticizing The Homeland when she was a child.

  She remembered her fantasies as an adolescent: life on the run with handsome boys, living in desert caves, talking about raids and revolution. What a child she had been. It was her father’s fault, but she was what he was: a Palestinian. Soon he would be dead, and blame would be useless, as it was already. A Palestinian. That was why she wanted to escape from history; it pressed down too hard on her. Now, she was dreaming again of the Star Market.

  Five-fifteen in the afternoon, she whispered.

  • • •

  GEORGE MOVED his head slightly.

  There was babble all around him.

  That noise, what was that noise? Sounded like gunfire or explosions. Did Ahmed have the gun? Salah al-Din, charge!

  Ahmed threw sand in his eyes, but the castle was rich and splendid. Splendid. Someone was holding his hand, how sweet, nice cool long fingers. Was it Nurse? Or Sandra? Sandra, it must be. Hard to say, it was so dark in here. He tried to open his eyes, but it was too much of an effort for a tired old coot like him. He gave in to the fatigue. Just lie down, stay calm, no one will hurt you.

  I have a lucky charm from home here in my pocket.

  That girl, gee, she was so pretty. Ahmed’s friend.

  Don’t bait me, Philip! Ahmed is my friend. They sent me to kill him, they made me do it, gave me their gun, but an Arab does not kill his Arab brother. Not for any reason besides family, and especially not with the enemy’s gun.

  But it was family, there was a question of family.