by Hesh Kestin
On the television screen, the unflappable news anchor in Atlanta, whom few viewers know was a longtime correspondent for The Jerusalem Post but whose political leanings are now less predictable, picks up the thread without missing a beat. “Hoop, so you’re saying no one knows definitively if Prof. Al-Masri is indeed being held by Israel?”
“That’s right. But generally reliable Palestinian sources we have spoken with do regard this as fact.”
“And the two Israeli soldiers?”
“Wolf, we know almost as little, not even their names, which have not been released. However, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces confirmed earlier today that the two were most probably taken prisoner by Hezbollah.”
“Thank you, Hoop. That was CNN Mideast bureau chief Floyd Hooper live from Jerusalem. Meanwhile, CNN has obtained a chilling video from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Sources in the Washington security establishment believe it to be genuine. Though CNN has edited this footage for content that is not suited to a general audience, viewers are cautioned that what you are about to see does contain scenes that—”
Dahlia puts down the remote as the screen goes black. “I don’t want it shown. Not in this house.”
48
At the same moment, Tawfeek Nur-al-Din and Fawaz Awad are also watching CNN, which has become the lens through which either side in any international conflict evaluates its success in convincing the world that it is completely in the right. Fawaz Awad puffs on the Gauloise in his gold cigarette holder, the Hezbollah commander smokes the same Liban brand found in a pile of twenty at the ambush point on the other side of the Israeli border. Butts overflow the large brass ashtray between the two men. From outside the apartment comes the sound of early evening automobile traffic and the occasional hoarse cough of a truck grinding its gears. Militiamen coming on duty at several choke points just to the east have already begun to limit access to the street. When no vehicles pass, the sound of dominoes being slapped down can be heard from the café across the street.
“What did I promise?” Fawaz Awad says. “Even according to the CNN, it is check.”
“Not every check leads to mate.”
“This one is guaranteed. In Nicosia I saw the old man’s face. He is tired. They are all tired.”
“But you say yourself he is not the decider, only the adviser. The Jews’ internal politics will cast the final vote.”
“That is as I have told you. If it were up to the old man, we could capture his own son and no exchange would be made.”
“He lost this son years ago, so this is simply an unprovable theorem.”
“Regardless, the internal politics of the Jews works against him. He is not only tired but helpless. It is the weakness of democracy. The Jews are sentimental for their children. And in the war room of public opinion, sentiment will always win out. It is all over but the Jewish disappointment. This check will be mate.”
“You think it is over?”
“I know it.”
“With the Jews, it is never over.”
“Damn the CNN—they have edited out the best parts.”
“They are in league with the Jews. The Jews control everything.”
49
At the same moment, on the damp cement floor of a basement in a bombed-out building only minutes away, Ari rocks the tracker cradled in his arms. The Bedouin is delirious, muttering incomprehensibly, though from time to time Ari makes out the word mare in Arabic and the phrase no more.
“What color is the mare, Salim?” Ari keeps asking as he rocks him in his arms. “Tell me, what color is the mare?”
50
Dahlia does not want to leave Uri but Dudik is there in the home he had only days before left for good. Uri is not going to school. His father is not going to the office. Neither of them is able to do anything but wait. Dahlia cannot wait.
Speeding through and around the early morning traffic on the coastal road, Elias drives with his teeth clenched, riding the horn when the siren alone is insufficient to clear the highway. In the front passenger seat Dahlia concentrates on nothing but the road, and then shuts her eyes so as not to see it at all. Elias has his job, she thinks. And I have mine.
She has moved into an almost unconscious state, a state of rest in preparation for the battle ahead, when she hears the cell phone buzzing in her bag. She does not bother to read who the caller is. She knows. “Yes?”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
She thinks, So the names have not been made public. “Wait one minute.” She has Elias pull over. Who knows how much English the driver knows. She steps away from the car. The noise of traffic is like an assault. “Floyd . . .”
“How is it going with Al-Masri?”
“I don’t have a clue,” she says. “And if I did, I wouldn’t say. Darling, I’m not a source for information on this. Anything you need to know about your colleague Al-Masri will have to come from somewhere else.”
“I never met the man,” he says. “Look, I need to see you.”
“Please don’t be offended, Floyd, but I’m not able to see you, not now.”
“I was thinking maybe I can help about . . . a related matter.”
She is silent.
“Something you might be able to pass on. I’ve been talking to our guy in a certain city north of here. Begins with a B.” No response. “Dahlia?”
“I’m listening.”
“This isn’t something for the phone.”
“I understand.”
“If you can’t come to Jerusalem, I can be in Tel Aviv.”
“Five o’clock. Jaffa. You know where.”
“I’ll be there.”
“One thing,” she says.
“I’m listening.”
“If this is just a ploy to see me, you’ll never see me again.”
“Five o’clock is a long time off,” he says. “It would be good to know who the soldiers are. I can be way out ahead on this. It’ll be helpful.”
“I can’t give you this information,” she says. “Is that all you want?”
“I told you. I had a word with our guy in . . . that place. It might be useful.”
“And you want something in return.”
“It’s not quid pro quo. I just thought, if you could get the names . . .”
“Floyd, go fuck yourself.”
“It’s so much more fun with you.”
She softens. He doesn’t know. I can’t blame him for that. Often when they arranged to meet, they went through this same small burlesque. She would say, But how will I know you? And he would say, Extremely attractive, black T-shirt, safari jacket, hard-on. And she would reply, I’ll see what I can do about that. It was just what they did. “At five, then.”
51
Whatever the press knows, or does not know, Dahlia’s status as mother of one of the missing soldiers is no secret in the headquarters building of the Israel Police. Only several days earlier she was a resented stranger parachuted into the ranks of a closed and somewhat xenophobic constabulary. Now she has become an object of sympathy, one of their own. The young policewoman who had that first day shown her to an office in the second sub-basement now rises from her reception desk in the lobby as if meeting Dahlia for the first time. “Chief superintendent.”
Dahlia pretends not to see the look on the girl’s face. “Is Zeltzer in the building?”
“I just want to say—”
“Thank you”—she looks down at the girl’s name tag—“Sarit. It’s not necessary.”
“We all feel—”
“Please call Zeltzer and tell him I’m coming up.”
Walking away Dahlia thinks, What a bitch I must seem. I don’t want to be like this. I really don’t. But I won’t have their pity, as though it’s a done deed. As though once the bastards have Ari, they have him and I’ll never get him back, never see him under the wedding canopy, never hold those particular grandchildren. What is that, she thinks in the elevator, prophylactic bitterness, bitterness before th
e fact? The elevator stops. Third floor. A uniformed captain steps in, a face she has never seen.
He pauses. “Going up?”
“All the way.”
He gets off on the fifth, then abruptly turns, gives her a thumbs-up.
She finds herself grimacing, then returns the gesture.
In the time it takes to reach the next floor she thinks, The old Dahlia, the one who is dead, would have chosen a different finger. Something has turned within her. She knows it. I will not be my mother, she thinks. Not even if the worst happens. But the worst won’t happen. I won’t let it. Who the hell do they think they’re dealing with? This is my son, my firstborn, my Ari. Fuck with my family? Fuck you.
She finds Zeltzer is in his office with two officers, one in civilian clothes. He puts up his hand as she comes to the door. There is supposed to be a secretary at the desk in the outer office, but Dahlia has never seen her. Or him. Nobody. The desk is neat, in-basket and out-basket equally empty. A stack of papers. A blue sweater on the back of the desk chair, one of those hand-knitted cardigans with a button front. It could be a man’s, it could be a woman’s. Probably quit and left the sweater, she thinks. Who could stand Zeltzer?
Her commander waves her in as the two officers leave. They give her the same look.
She offers a weak smile, just the slightest flexing of her lips, an instant and it is gone. “Chief commissioner, we need to talk.”
“Clearly. You’d better sit.”
She does so. “I had a word with Jumblatt last night.”
“I was compelled to leave early. I would have preferred to be here myself to—”
“I would have preferred you stay out of my area of authority.”
He selects a cigar from a lacquered wooden box on his desk.
Absurdly, she thinks, Dudik smokes better ones. There is no money in the civil service.
He rolls the cigar around in his hand. “You should be happy I haven’t suspended you, Advocate Barr. This is not an optimal situation.”
“Chief Supt. Barr.”
“Correct.” He puts the cigar down, a prop, perhaps a crutch. He purses his lips. “Let us be Chaim and Dahlia for a moment. Is that all right?”
“Do you really expect to me to stand aside and let your incompetents fuck this up as they do everything else?” She nearly spits it out: “Chaim.”
“Your son is a soldier, Dahlia.”
“He’s not yet twenty years old.”
“The Bedouin, too. Soldiers. For better or worse, it’s an Army matter.”
“Let me tell you about this Army matter. Ari breast-fed until he was two. He wouldn’t separate, glued to it, to me. When he was three, they found a tumor in his leg. After it was cut out I carried him around for a month. All through school he got into trouble for talking back to his teachers. Every week I used to have to go there and smooth it over. Chief commissioner, I don’t—”
“Chaim. Please.”
“Chaim, I don’t give a damn if this is an Army affair. This is a mother’s affair. I don’t care about anything but my son. Neither you nor the Army will make all the decisions here.”
“You understand that there exists a larger question. A political dimension. In the event there is a prisoner exchange, there must not be a mark on Al-Masri. He will lie anyway. That we can’t help. But he must not be touched.”
“You people, you can’t possibly understand.”
Again he goes for the cigar. He rolls it between his fingers, taps it on the desk. “I lost mine at eighteen,” Zeltzer says. He is half looking away. “He wasn’t in the Army six months.”
In the ensuing silence both of them hear a phone ringing insistently from down the hall. Five rings, six. Then it stops. After a moment it begins to ring again.
“We’re shorthanded,” Zeltzer says. “They give us desks and phones, but no one to answer them. For a year I have been trying to change the phone system so that an unanswered call will roll over to a manned desk. It’s primitive. There is never any money for the Police.”
“I’m so sorry, chief commissioner. I . . .”
“Please. Chaim. My wife . . . you don’t want to know. She never got over it. I live with two ghosts. The boy’s, and hers. They say for some the hair turns white overnight. Just like that, like paint. With her it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. She just . . . died.”
“I shouldn’t have—”
He waves her off. “It doesn’t change anything. It’s just the way it is.”
“It won’t end, will it?” It is as if someone inside her is speaking.
“Not in our lifetime,” he says. “Not in our children’s, those that survive. My parents brought me from Russia when I was ten. They wanted me to live without hearing filthy Jew in the street. They wanted me to grow up free, to be a free Jew in a free Jewish land. But nothing is free, is it? Especially freedom.”
“Chaim, I need to handle this.”
As though coming to a decision, Zeltzer returns the cigar to its lacquered wooden box. “I’m not the most pleasant commander, am I? My men fear me. They don’t love me. You feel the same. Most people do.”
“I thought you’re a piece of shit.”
He laughs, just enough. It comes out as a snort. “I have been called worse. The monsters killed my son. I became like them. Every night I awaken bathed in sweat. It doesn’t stop. It will never stop.”
“One day it must.”
“You’ll see, Dahlia. Even if your boy is saved. You won’t be. You’ll be like me.”
“Chaim . . .”
Zeltzer clears his throat, his voice dropping an octave. “Chief Supt. Barr, pursuant to instructions from the political echelon, I officially inform you that I have forbidden the use of extraordinary measures relating to the interrogation of prisoner Mohammed Al-Masri.” His voice shrinks to a whisper. “What in fact you do with him is your own business. Dismissed.”
52
Three armed men enter the room in which Ari and Salim sleep. Light floods in from the open door. Ari opens one eye, then closes it. They have been in darkness for many hours. Who knows how long? Salim sleeps on, his head in Ari’s lap.
“No more for this one,” Ari says in stilted Arabic. His eyes adjust. “He will die.”
One of the men says, “It is you we require.”
Ari does not move.
“Come, rise.”
Ari arranges their filthy blanket into a ball, slipping it under Salim’s head as he gets to his feet. He is unsteady. Two films run simultaneously through his mind. In one a bad thing is about to happen; in the other he is about to be released. He thinks, Not the good film. They would be releasing us together. Then he thinks, But it could be me. It could be one at a time. As he puts his hands behind his back for the handcuffs he sees the long drive to the border in the company of Red Cross personnel, men with short-cropped blond hair wearing spectacles and starched, pressed clothes, asking if he wants a cigarette or a candy bar. Swiss chocolate that—
They have arrived at the makeshift television studio.
53
In the hushed room with the garage door–sized electronic map, the eyes of a dozen officers are fixed on the video playing on a large screen. It is all too familiar: the martial music, the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah, the title beneath it—FREE MOHAMMED EDWARD AL-MASRI in English and Arabic—and then the inevitable action whose only sound track is the thwack of broomsticks striking the boy’s stomach and then his back, his stomach and then his back, a kind of rhythm section for the boy’s cries as they ebb and flow like an oboe solo overlaid against a bass line of thwacks. The rhythm is steady, unaltered, but the boy’s cries follow some atonal musical text: He cries out differently from a hit in the stomach or the kidneys, each distinctive wailing note cut short only by the next stroke. Like some dissonant symphony, it seems to go on without form until finally it just stops, at which point the boy is left hanging by his wrists like a beef carcass, silent and raw.
But still alive.
<
br /> His captors make sure of that. Only alive is he worth anything, and only suffering is he worth a good deal more.
While two of Kobi’s specialists begin a frame-by-frame analysis of the footage, which soon enough will be playing in television newsrooms around the world after it is determined how much torture is too much for the general public and how much is necessary to remain competitive in the business of news, Kobi moves to a desk at the far end of the room. Here he is unlikely to be overheard. He dials a number.
“The chief of staff is in a meeting,” an adjutant says on the other end.
“Tell him it’s a matter of urgency.”
In a few moments, Aviv Toledano’s rich baritone comes on the line. His hobby is singing. There is in fact a professional singer with close to the same name, one Avi Toledano. The general’s critics like to say that the country would be better protected with the singer in charge of the IDF. “Kobi, I was expecting this call.”
“Then I don’t have to—”
“Just clear it with Chaim Zeltzer.”
“You’ll pave the way?”
“It’s all dream work at this point. Hypothetical.”
“If it happens—”
“A deal is a deal, Kobi. I promised, the prime minister gave it his stamp of approval. In a military crisis, you are reactivated at your request. Period.”
“I’m in your debt.”
“Be that as it may, you’re in Zeltzer’s employ. Clear it with him.”
“Toli . . .”
“The trouble with this country, everyone wants to be a hero.”
Kobi does not feel like a hero. It is he who will have to tell Dahlia that the next video stars her son. In a half hour or so he will go to her office. This is not something he wants her to see on CNN.
54
This time she has Al-Masri brought to her office. There is no sense in extending the charade, she thinks. If the man does not already know, then it is time he does. Besides which, unlike the interview room, her office can be locked from within. The two constables leave.