by Amy Wilentz
My, it’s nice to lie here quietly.
Family. Yes, that’s right, it was the little boy. Don’t kick my castle down, little boy. Stop all the clocks. Turn off that ranting, babbling noise.
Where is that child?
He’s lost, down in the orchard, Grandfather.
Send for him, send for him.
What time is it?
• • •
MARINA LOOKED OVER at her father. He was checking his wrist again. It was disturbing to her, this constant checking of his wrist, because she knew he had so little time left. She leaned over to him.
“It’s five-thirty, now, Daddy,” she whispered. Twilight was spreading over the Arab villages below.
• • •
DADDY. DADDY. It’s five-thirty in the evening. A lovely day for a picnic, they’d had. We took the horses down through the village. Down the hill through the almond trees to Grandfather’s, with the turbulent cousins running among the hooves. The blossoms are pink, the pinkest palest pink like children’s skin.
Oh, Grandfather, I’ve found the boy. Look! He was hiding there behind the cypress, silly thing. Kiss me, little Ibrahim, you scoundrel! Gotcha! I have him by the scruff of the neck. Aren’t you glad I found him, Grandfather?
I am glad, so glad. And lucky to find him before nightfall, too, young fellow. Put the darling little one up on my lap.
Send Hamad on the donkey for water with the earthenware jug.
There goes Hamad, disappearing under Grandfather’s willow toward the well. Grandfather’s put his walking stick down and he’s sitting on the terrace with his fez and all his medals, and that sweet little big-eyed boy on his lap. Let’s go down among the bushes, shall we, Sandra?
I have a patient and another patient, George the Worm. Twist it into the heart. Carefully, my little angel!
Where’s my lucky charm, my shiny silver key?
Marina! Save me, kiss me, where are you? Hold my hand tight.
What time is it?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
OLD GUY THOUGHT HE WAS sleeping but Doron was not sleeping. He knew what was lying flat against his throat. It was a final judgment. A sharp and shiny final judgment. Doron willed himself to relax beneath the blade, to keep his breathing calm and regular. His heart was pounding. Easier, he thought, to be his father, hit suddenly, full blast, in the middle of a battle, than to lie here passively, waiting. He could smell the other man, his smoky, garlicky breath. It was definitely the lawyer and not the young one. Somehow he held out more hope for the lawyer than for the kid. The lawyer wanted to do it, but there could be mitigating circumstances. The other was young and probably thought he had nothing to lose. He was like Doron.
• • •
THEN SOMETHING CHANGED. The blade was removed and Big Hands started to pummel him into consciousness. He pretended to wake suddenly. Maybe they just wanted to finish him off someplace else. He couldn’t make out their Arabic.
“We go now,” Big Hands said to him in Hebrew; it was always the younger ones who could speak it; they learned it from the television. Big Hands unchained him from the desk and stood him up. They whisked him to the bathroom—a brief respite. He wondered if the bathroom stop meant they would be going a long distance now.
“Are we going far?” Doron asked Big Hands.
Big Hands looked at him.
“Don’t ask questions, you,” he said.
He took the gag and the keffiyeh from his back pocket and wrapped them again around Doron’s head.
They hustled him down the stairs—he wondered why they didn’t wait to put on the blindfold until after the stairs were negotiated; not thinking, probably—and out to the car. They pushed him up against it so that his knees were touching the fender. One of them opened the back door, and while Doron was standing next to the car, waiting for the next thing to happen, someone came up behind him with a whoosh of air and the sound of something descending, and Doron fell into the backseat and blackness.
• • •
SHE’D FALLEN ASLEEP in the chair next to George’s bed, and when the light came up over the villages below his window, it struck her across the face and woke her. His monitor was still beeping. She’d been dreaming of the soldier. She wondered what had happened to him. Spirited away like that, when his only reason for coming was to express his shame. Well, if you didn’t like to be ashamed, you shouldn’t be an Israeli soldier, she thought. We were all victims of history.
She looked at her father. He seemed asleep, but deep asleep. A painful lump of sadness swelled in her throat. George’s breath came in puddles and falls and great gasps and gulps, as if he were drowning. He tapped his hand against his side, over and over, as if he were feeling his pockets. This was new. He had no pockets, anyway. He was wearing a humiliating hospital robe with Hebrew scrawled all over it.
Ahmed was outside in his car in the parking lot, using his cell phone, and Philip was sleeping on a couch in the waiting room. Marina stood and kissed her father and smoothed his cheek. Even dying like this, in an Israeli hospital, too thin and bleeding and unable to breathe, he was still heroic, still the handsomest man she had ever seen, except for Hassan. He would find it so ironic to be dying under Zionist sheets, in a Zionist robe. She kissed him again, and held his hand briefly. When she let go, he patted his side again.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said to him. Pat, pat, pat.
She went to get coffee from the stand downstairs.
• • •
NOW HERE HE WAS. Where was he? Doron shook his head. He had received a terrible blow. His head was pounding. His eyes were wide open but everything was black and his face felt constricted. Why? Doron reached up with a hand he could move—ah, they had uncuffed him—and felt his face: the blindfold. Well, that was a good explanation, and it cheered him because he was lying here thinking but not letting himself think that for all he knew they might have blinded him while he was unconscious from that blow. Or was it a blow? Possibly he had fallen, fallen from something, what was the last thing he could remember? Doron tried to gather his wits. His head did hurt.
He was lying somewhere, outside. It was cold. There was something rubbing against his back, now, stones or rubble. It was not car upholstery and it was not linoleum.
He wiggled his back. It was like a massage, all those pebbles or whatever against him, he was having his back scratched. He untied his gag, pulled off the blindfold, and saw the sky. Evening or dawn. He had just about lost track of time but he thought it was night coming on, it seemed the beginning of darkness, rather than the end of it. He loved the night, especially the night without Yizhar. His captors seemed nowhere about. In fact, there was no one near. Only sky. He looked up into it. A few cars passed by. Blue night, blue night. The air was a good fresh cold that roused his brain. Thank God for oxygen and the dark, Doron thought. Above him he could see faint stars, but in the foreground, telephone wires and cables running on and on and poles carrying them, and a huge stone wall rising next to him and obstructing his view, and then the dark blue sky beyond.
Can I stand, he wondered? He bent his legs, and that was not nice, not a nice feeling, not good, he was stiff and felt like old iron. But he did it, and then bent at the waist, and that bent too, with a tearing sensation of a rip on his right side, a huge tear of some kind. He sat on the pavement and felt his side. Wet with ooze. He looked down at his hand. It was like a cup of blood, viscous blood, very black, clotted. He felt himself begin to swoon, but then he recovered. He slapped himself on the face hard with his clean hand, which woke him. He balanced his body away from the pavement and stood. It was a reeling, dizzying moment, and then he righted himself. He stuck his hand back over the wound and felt into it, his fingers went in as if into some kind of wet pocket. It felt shockingly deep and wet and red.
Now he remembered. He had come back to consciousness in the car after a terrible blow. He was lying over the back hump, and his body ached terribly. He gasped or sobbed and heard the lawyer say in Ar
abic, as plain as day: Let’s leave him here. Khallinah nitriko hon. The car stopped, then, with a small screech, and Doron was tossed forward on the floor. He remembered Big Hands; Big Hands was pushing him out of the car somewhere and he was half conscious at best with the moon spinning up and over and then down and up and over and then down, and then a blade came up into the air in front of the moon out of nowhere sparkling all of a sudden and Big Hands lifted it high over the stars and struck, and Doron had that moment of thinking, He just can’t leave me without a mark of hatred. It would be too humiliating.
He looked down at his side, now. He was bleeding away. Too much, Doron thought. I might bleed to death right here. Well, at least my penance is done. It is done, isn’t it, Marina? He looked around. He was standing below a high garden wall in Ramallah, and he recognized it—the last wall of the residential area, just where the commercial part of town begins. A pink light stirred at the bottom of the sky, and more cars started to roam the streets. He heard the call to prayer. It was morning, not night. A newspaper blew across the street and over up against the window of a hardware store. In the yellowy light of the dawn, men were trailing into a doorway a block away.
He’d go there, Doron thought. It looked busy—not a place where anyone would think of finishing him off. He dragged himself to the curb and held on to a lamppost. He held on passionately, like a drunk. Finally he summoned up his strength and slowly staggered across the street. My God, I might not make it. He fell at the curb on the other side, but hoisted himself up against the rickety tin of a closed pita stand. For a few minutes, he stood there balancing against it, thinking of Marina’s open dreaming eyes and Big Hands’ hands. And then he stumbled up a little incline past the tea shop that was closed for Ramadan, and leaning now against the sides of the buildings, hauled himself into a tiny cement-block courtyard where he had seen men gathering. Almost at the door, Doron tried to catch his breath. He heard himself inhale—it sounded like bubbling. Was air escaping from his side? He clung to a bookcase that was filled with shoes. It struck him funny, shoes in a bookcase. His side felt wet, but he didn’t want to look down. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. He was afraid he might faint before he could get help.
Some kind of murmuring was coming from inside. Doron turned into the open doorway. Exposed bulbs hung down from a low ceiling, and all across the floor, men were on their knees, their backs to him. He felt carpet under his boots. Against the back wall, a sheikh in a white turban was saying something. Doron stood there, facing him across the room. He looked frail and ghostly to Doron in the sparse light. Oh, Sheikh, Sheikh, in your turban and robes, horror and fear spreading over your old face. Rescue me, rescue me. Following the sheikh’s stare, the praying men began to turn in unison toward the door. And then, to the amazement of the scattering supplicants, the big soldier lurched forward into the mosque, tracking mud from his boots over the prayer rugs. He stumbled blindly in one direction and then another. Men with angry faces rush toward him. “Duktor, duktor,” Doron heard someone shout. His legs were bending beneath him like reeds in the wind, and he reached out to steady himself, but there was nothing there. The room with all the men in it was spinning and spinning. He turned, and turned again, and fell face forward onto the floor.
• • •
FATEFUL COFFEE, good and strong but American style, what she’d grown up with. Marina stood there in the hallway with her almost empty Styrofoam cup, standing back from the small crowd that had gathered outside his door. She knew it was over. She’d come back with her coffee to find that group huddled there, mostly patients and doctors from the hospital who had gathered to witness the passing of Israel’s fabled opponent. For some reason what came into Marina’s mind was the dilapidated suitcase her father had packed to leave her house. The suitcase that had gone everywhere her family had gone.
She’d missed the very moment of his death. Perhaps that was just as well but she knew she would regret it always. She made her way through the cluster at the door. Doctors were all over the place, having failed to resuscitate George, and Ahmed was sitting in the big chair in the corner, with his face in his hands. A pearly glow lit the window behind him. Marina was not ready to feel anything except that it was over. Philip came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder but she shook him off gently.
There was George, the center of attention in death as in life. A Palestinian in an Israeli hospital: it was as good an ending as any, and full of meaning for a man who had never been able finally to say that any slice of humanity was wrong or evil or bad, though he had criticized and denounced with the best. She went over to the bed and touched the side of his face. No amount of advance warning prepared her for the emptiness that death created. There was no end of difference between a living body—even comatose or unconscious or asleep—and a dead one. She stroked his hair.
Ahmed came over to her side.
“I did love him, Marina,” Ahmed said. He reached for her hand. “In spite of everything.”
She nodded. “I know, Uncle,” she said.
“I think he might get up and walk out the door,” Ahmed said.
She looked up at him and shook her head.
“But I know what you mean,” she said. She picked up George’s hand. She looked at it, trying to commit it to memory.
“More than an octave,” she said.
Ahmed laughed.
“Yes, I remember that,” he said.
• • •
SHE WOULD BURY him in the family plot in Nazareth.
A nurse came up to her.
“Personal effects,” she said, handing Marina a cardboard box.
Marina put the box down on the windowsill.
“I’ll arrange everything, Marina,” Philip said. His eyes were red. Poor Philip.
“Thank you, Philip,” she said.
She started to sort through what was in the box.
Oh, nothing. His trousers. His wallet, with the Authority identification, his Peter Bent card, a picture of Mom. Socks, underwear, so very pathetic. Shoes. His bloody shirt that Ahmed had told her all about. The gun, for heaven’s sake. She didn’t touch it. Somehow she would send that back to the soldier—Ahmed had told her everything. To the soldier.
Or to his family.
And George’s jacket. She looked at it, holding it up and dusting it off in front of the window through which she could see the day beginning. Cars were starting up on faraway sandy hills, children in groups walked to school, two men on donkeys headed out to their field, and down a rocky path, a shepherd and his son made their way to a distant pasture, with their tawny flock trailing alongside the main road in a desultory fashion. She felt in the pockets of the jacket and found George’s passport and some change and the old iron key.
Her childhood toy, always snatched back at the end of a few minutes by her anxious father. She hadn’t seen it in years, but it was not something that was ever very far from her mind. It was shiny like something new, but it had the weight and feel of keys made a century ago. She held it in her open hand. It was almost as long as her palm. He carried it everywhere.
“This is rightfully yours, Marina,” he used to say to her when she was little. “This and the house it belongs to.”
Rightfully. Marina remembered not knowing what that word meant.
“He told me he was going to give that to you,” Philip said, from behind her.
I don’t want it, I don’t want it, she thought. And yet she clutched the key as if she were already going down beneath black water and this were her lifeline back up to the surface, and air.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply indebted to All That Remains and Before Their Diaspora, by Walid Khalidi.
And many grateful thanks to Kate Manning, Nihaya Qawasmi, Jessica Lazar, and Jim Wilentz for their careful readings of this manuscript.
Thanks, too, to Alice Mayhew for her continued support, her thoughtful changes and emendations, and her helpful prodding on this project; to Anja Schmidt for al
l her work, and to Deborah Karl.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Wilentz won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for nonfiction and the Whiting Writers Award, and was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990. She is the author of The Rainy Season, and has written for The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. She was Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker from 1995 to 1997. She lives in New York City with her husband and three sons.
Also by Amy Wilentz
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier
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Copyright © 2001 by Amy Wilentz
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Designed by Brooke Zimmer Koven
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilentz, Amy.
Martyrs’ crossing : a novel / Amy Wilentz.
p. cm.
1. Palestinian Americans—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Americans—Israel—Fiction. 4. Children—Death—Fiction. 5. Mothers and sons—Fiction 6. Jerusalem—Fiction. 7. Soldiers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.I4284 M37 2001
813’.6—dc21 00-052628
ISBN 0-684-85436-8
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3487-6 (eBook)