The Wanting

by Michael Lavigne

  “That’s it. Fishman. Poor thing. But it didn’t matter, that’s exactly when I went into labor. Ladovska jumped up. ‘You’re faking! Everyone can see that.’ ‘So what is that all over the floor? Orange juice?’ You know, they are so ludicrous. Whatever they make up, that’s what they believe. Now Vasin leaps into action, but not in such a way as to get his uniform dirty. He dials the phone! Poor Fishman, stuck in the corner, is glued to her chair. Ladovska has her hands on her hips, deciding if I am a great actor or just a woman having a baby. In come the guards, but they don’t know what to do either, so I say, ‘May I please go to the infirmary?’ But it all was happening too fast, probably because I was so undernourished. I was having contractions all the way down the corridors. Can you imagine, we’d take a few steps, a guard on either side of me, and I’d collapse to the floor. They were very sweet, really. They’d wait patiently for me to stop writhing and then lead me farther into the depths of the prison. When we got to the infirmary, no one had bothered to tell them anything, and the questions started all over again. ‘Well, we’ll have to find her a mattress. The doctor isn’t here till tonight. Sit over there and wait.’ But in the end they took pity on me. That’s often the way it is in here. It was only three hours later Anya was born. And this was when everyone started to panic. The child could not stay in the prison. But what to do with it? What to do with me, if they forcefully took away my child?

  “They didn’t wait very long. The next day Vasin came to see me. It was the first time he’d come to me and not the other way around. My breasts had no milk, and they had had to rush out to a party dispensary to find formula for her. He asked if he could feed her. I said to him, ‘Oh, Vasin, you are too kind!’ But he remained cheerful, pulled up a chair, sat very near to me. Never had he been so physically close. Before the baby, everything had smelled more disgusting than I can even describe. I couldn’t get used to it the way everyone else seemed to. Vasin himself had an oily smell, like oysters. But now I realized it was actually some sort of cologne. ‘Collette,’ he said to me, the first time he had ever uttered my name in that way, ‘I want you to listen with an open mind, just this once. On the occasion of this wonderful miracle. Can you do that? When I see this beautiful child, I also do not want it to end up in an orphanage. You might as well be sending it to a labor camp. She’ll end up a thief or worse, because they all do. That’s what they learn there. I know by now you are not going to sign a confession, you are not going to see reason and allow yourself to be rehabilitated. You are determined to continue this Zionist insanity and undermine everything that is good in the Soviet Union. I accept this. I am sorry for you, but I accept it. The trial is going to be happening soon, I am allowed to tell you that much, and there is no avoiding it. You can count on a severe sentence, and there is no avoiding that at this point either, unless you change your mind. But there is no reason the child has to suffer. I have a suggestion, I offer a solution. What if the child were to go with Guttman? He is the father, after all, isn’t that what you said? What harm could it be if he took the child? Wouldn’t that be the best for everyone?’ He looked at me lying there with the baby asleep in my arms, for they had let me keep her after feeding her her bottle, and then he added, ‘After the trial, of course.’ I knew what he wanted now. My silence for her freedom. ‘Till then, we’ll keep her in a nursery, but you will be able to see her every day.’ And for the first time since I had been in Lefortovo, I felt I could breathe.

  “Our time will soon be up, my darling Roman. You have a question for me.”

  “No.”

  “You want to know …”

  “No.”

  “Who is the father.”

  “Collette,” I said, “I am the father.”

  That was the last time I saw Collette. She disappeared into the camps, and then, according to the report of the medical examiner, she died of “natural causes” one year later. But I was already in a far-off land, beginning a new life, with a new child.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE DOOR OPENED AND CLOSED, open and closed, as if Abdul-Latif thought I might have evaporated into the bedsheets. Each time he peeked in, he made that clucking noise that Arabs often make, and then he would quickly disappear behind the locked door.

  Finally he stepped into the room and stood with his hands on his hips, appraising me. “You are not getting better,” he said. “You are not drinking my water. My water is not poison for you.” He strode up to the bedside and grabbed the glass that had been sitting untouched on the night table. “Look!” he cried, and drank half of it himself. “Now you!” He pressed the glass into my hand, but my fingers could not find a way to hold it. He lifted the glass to my lips, but I turned my head away and the water dripped down my chin. He cursed in his own language and slammed the glass down. He began pacing in front of the bed.

  “You know, Mr. Guttman, my daughter Hanadi is seventeen. She is the youngest one. She will be married before Marya, I assure you. Marya cannot find anyone she likes, and I won’t force her into anything. Her mother would, but not me. Those ideas are over for me. But Hanadi has had a thousand offers, and she likes too many of them, if you ask me, so she will choose. I want her to be married as soon as possible. It’s the only way to save her. You know what Hanadi has told me? She thinks we should throw you to the crowd. She thinks it’s the right thing to do. We should throw you to the crowd, and then she can go out with her friends dancing. Can you hear them? Of course you can. They get louder and louder. Very angry. Upset. It’s all the men of the town, and the boys, too. Probably my wife is with them. They want to cut off your head and throw your body at the foot of that Israeli settlement up on our hill. Kfar Tikva. It’s only been there a few years, but they already have beautiful houses, a school, a grocery, a library. At first the soldiers came to push them out, but they returned and rebuilt. Now we have to look at them every day.” He walked over to the window as if to peruse the Jewish village, but the window was too high to look out of, except to see a bit of sky. He came back to me and sat down. “Come in here, Hanadi!” he called out.

  The door slowly opened, and Hanadi shyly stepped in. She was very slender and petite, with large, dark eyes, and a smooth bright complexion. Her cheeks were the plump cheeks of a schoolgirl, but her lips were a woman’s. She had tied a green bandana over her forehead and a black checked kaffiah around her neck.

  “You see?” he said. “Brigade of Al-Qassam. Woman’s Auxiliary.”

  He said something to her in Arabic, and she nodded.

  “Young Woman’s Auxiliary. But if I tell her to bring you something sweet to eat, she will do that, too. She’s a good girl.” He said something else to her in Arabic, and she left the room.

  “You’re thinking, why do they want to harm me? What have I done to them? You can’t in all honesty say you are a civilian, can you? So they are within their rights. Legally, I mean. Being in reserves means you are still a soldier.” He looked me up and down, at the split, dry lips and sunken bloodshot eyes, the wounds still not fully healed and the skin cracking open between my fingers, and he sighed. “I don’t know why I saved you. So much trouble on my own head.”

  Hanadi again shyly opened the door. She carried a small plate with some cookies on it. “Mammoul,” she said. It was the first time she had spoken in my presence, and her voice was lovely—untinged with the cynicism of Jewish teenagers, just the voice of a young girl on the brink of life—but the little plate shook in her hands; she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. Abdul-Latif reached out his hand and grabbed a cookie. “Mmmm,” he said, biting into it. “Not bad. Nadja, my wife, used to make them so beautifully. These are from the bakery. They’re not bad. Just not the same.” He said something again in Arabic, and Hanadi laid the plate on the table beside me. “If you eat our mammoul, you’ll be very thirsty, and then you will have to drink,” he said. “It’s an Arab trick.” And he laughed.

  There was suddenly an urgent knocking on the exterior door.

&nbs
p; Abdul-Latif called out in Hebrew so I would understand, “Marya, Marya! See who is at the door.” And then he added to me, “Marya is my other one. I better see what they want.”

  Abdul-Latif stood up to go.

  “My friend,” he said, “if you think this is just another dream of yours, if you think you are still talking to birds, you are very wrong.”

  And with that, he motioned to Hanadi, and they went together though the door. Again the key turned in the lock.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  IN THE DAYS LEADING TO MY SHAHADAH, I was immersed in prayer. I bathed my feet and hands in the waters of el-Kas, the well of al-Aqsa, which they told us rises up from the rivers of Eden, and I entered the great mosque and stayed there for hours on end, meditating. Then I would take the bus back to Jabal, to Walid’s place, where we would talk and study late into the night. Only then would I sleep a few hours, lying between Walid and Fayez on the hard floor. In the morning we would wash, pray, and prepare a little hummus and tea. He always had dates and figs, sliced apples, and sweets of various kinds, and at night there was usually maqluba. We were never hungry, even though we fasted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Walid had found us a small room where no one knew us, but this room made Walid despair. He often talked about his real house, which he had never seen. It had been in the village of Umm Kalkha near al-Ramleh. He wore the key around his neck. His father had given it to him, his father who also had never seen this house. Yet Walid could describe it in the most vivid detail, and I, too, felt as if I once had a life within those walls. “Umm Kalkha was abandoned before the war,” he said bitterly. “They were so full of fear, they left it all behind. They thought nothing of it. The idea that they could fight for it never even crossed their minds. They left their fates to the cowardly Nasserites and Hashemites, may Allah have mercy on them, and this is all that is left for me.” He spit on his key and polished it between his fingers. I said to him, “And my father, what will he say to me?” And Walid said to me, “This jihad is fard al-ain. The slave may rebel from his master, the son from his father. Your father does not have the power to stop you, for your power comes from Allah, praise be to the All Merciful.” Every day I spent many hours alone with Yusuf al-Faruk, my sheikh, who organized the operation, for I had been taken into the Battalions of Qassam. Yusuf al-Faruk trained me day and night, and I, like a falcon on the path of All-Knowing Allah, swooped up his leavings. These were my happiest days. These were my days of light. “For the call!” I repeated after him. “For the Muslim Brotherhood!” I wanted to care only for Islam and for the purity of my soul at the end of days. Paradise was always before my eyes, for the life of this world was worth nothing, and I yearned to yearn for death, saying, as Yusuf al-Faruk instructed me, “Truly there is only one death, so let it be on the path of Allah.”

  And so I prepared for my martyrdom, and I did not go home for a very long time.

  Oh. A stab into my heart that can no longer feel! A vision through these eyes that have no right to see!

  I am standing before the blank wall, with Walid and Sheikh al-Faruk and Ra’id Mashriki and also Hassan Bahar, and we are all pinning up the posters, FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA! ISLAM IS THE ANSWER! THE BATTALIONS OF THE MARTYR IZZ AD-DIN AL-QASSAM, THE GUARDIAN OF AL-AQSA! I am wearing a suit, yes, a gray suit and a tie, a blue tie, a white shirt, but around my head is a white headband, and on it the words GOD IS GREAT, and around my waist is a holster and in it a pistol, and in my arms is an AK-47, and in a scabbard tied around my left bicep is a khanjar, thirsty for blood. And look! My beard, the one I grew after I was reborn, is gone. I look at myself in my suit and my nice oxford shoes, and I almost feel like laughing. I’m practically the old me. Hassan Bahar steps behind the camera and waves at us, and Walid and Yusuf al-Faruk and Ra’id Mashriki step away, and there I am, alone in front of our artful backdrop of flags and slogans, and I glance down at my necktie and my oxfords, and I rear up to the camera and cry, “I am ready for business!” And I hear Sheikh Yusuf’s voice, “If Allah wills it!” And I answer him, “If Allah wills it!” And Sheikh Yusuf asks, “And what business are you ready for? For the business of Allah, Lord of the Worlds?” “Yes! For the business of Allah, Most Merciful and Magnificent!” And he says, “Tell us, O Shahid, what are your plans?” And I answer, “God willing, it will not be Jerusalem, it will not be Tel Aviv, but where they believe they can hide from the justice of Allah, Lord of the Worlds, in their suburbs and their enclaves and their safest places.” “Tell us then,” he urges. And I tell him, “Tomorrow, if Allah wills it, I will destroy the Jews on bus line forty-seven, and, Allah permitting, my soul will go to Paradise where I will meet the Prophet and his Companions, peace be upon them, and the souls of the infidels will burn on earth and also in Hell.”

  “You will kill many offspring of pigs and monkeys!”

  “The Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, said, You will indeed fight against the Jews and you will kill them to the point where the rock and the tree will say: O Muslim! O Abdullah! There is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.”

  And the voice, which of course is Sheikh Yusuf’s, cries, “Ever since the first hour, the Jews hated the Muslims and their Prophet. In fact, our Prophet, Muhammad, may he find favor always, was never safe from these Jews. They tried to kill him three times. One time, they tried to kill him by putting a heavy rock on his head. Another time was when they placed poison in the forearm of a goat for him to eat. And a third case was when the Jewish boy, Lubaid bin al-A’asam, may Allah’s curse be upon him, put a magic spell on him.”

  And now another voice, this time Walid’s, “Wasn’t it the Jews who set fire to our precious al-Aqsa?”

  And then Hassan Bahar from behind the camera, “Weren’t they the ones who killed our Muslim brothers while they prayed in the holy month of Ramadan in Masjid al-Khaleel?”

  I answer, “Yes! They cut open the stomachs of pregnant women and murdered our Muslim babies, they tore down our houses and uprooted our olive trees, they burned our villages and slaughtered our young men!”

  And now Ra’id Mashriki calls to me, “Wasn’t it the Jews who transformed the mosques of Palestine into bars for alcohol and gambling? Did they not turn them into compounds for animals and garbage dumps?”

  “Allahu Akhbar!” we all cry as one. “Allahu Akhbar!” And Sheikh Yusuf al-Faruk says, “Show us then, how you plan to execute your mission!”

  Now, finally, I can tear open my shirt and show them! But I must be extremely careful not to pull off any buttons or rip the material in any way, or even wrinkle it too much, and this takes quite a long time to accomplish, so it does not make quite the impression I had hoped, but at last my shirt is open and I can fully display the neatly packed tubes of explosives wrapped around my waist in the explosive belt that had been so cleverly hidden beneath the three-piece suit I am wearing.

  In the camera you can probably see Sheikh Yusuf’s hand, because he gets so excited he forgets to stay out of the picture. “Such a blessing from Allah, magnificent in his mercy! Such a weapon, who has seen such a weapon before?”

  “And I will have other weapons as well,” I tell him, “a great quantity of weapons. This pistol, this knife, and these grenades. I ask Allah, Eternal and All Knowing, only for this, to bestow martyrdom upon me and victory also, not one or the other, but victory in martyrdom!”

  “Yet we rely not on weapons but on Allah, Lord of the Worlds.”

  “My living and my dying belong to Allah!”

  “And what do you say, O Shahid, to the Cubs of Hamas?”

  “Oh, young boys and girls! Remember, soldiering is not the way for all, but if, Allah permitting, you are called, you must answer with all the blood in your veins. Do not spare a drop! Mujahideen of Palestine! Tomorrow the storm of revenge will rain down on the occupiers of your land!”

  “How sweet is death for the homeland! May the prayers of Allah be upon you!”

  “The blood of the martyrs is calling me.”

  An
d then very calmly, Sheikh Yusuf asks, “O Shahid, tell us, is there someone you would like to greet?”

  And I answer him, “Yes! This is my greeting: Peace upon you, Fadi bin-Rashid al Husseini al-Hijaz! I say to you, my friend, my brother Fadi, with whom I share but one heart, one heart in Islam, to you, Fadi, I say, today is the day of your happiness!”

  “And where is Fadi al-Hijaz?”

  “In Paradise, drinking from streams of purple wine.”

  “Fadi al-Hijaz, martyr of Jabal! He killed two soldiers with one stone! And what else do you have to say to Fadi al-Hijaz?”

  “That this operation is under the banner IN HONOR OF FADI AL-HIJAZ, for whenever I think of Fadi, whenever I see his image on his martyr card or on his poster, I always say, O Allah, Most Magnanimous, make me like him!”

  “God willing, you will depart for Paradise tomorrow! A bridegroom going to his wedding! Full of love! Full of hope! And what is your name, O Shahid?”

  I hold up my Kalashnikov in my left hand and my Qur’an in my right hand, and I say, “My name is abu-Fadi! For truly now, I am father to him who delivered me here.”

  From behind the camera I hear Hassan Bahar say, “I think that’s enough.” But I say, “I want to say something to my mother.” And he turns the camera back on.

  I take from my pocket a piece of paper and unfold it. I am seated now on the cushion, and the belt is pressing into me a little painfully. I read.

  “Mother, Father, though you have not seen me for several months because I am among the hunted, know that you are in my thoughts, indeed are always in my thoughts. Do not weep for me. In fact, have a party, the wedding party you always wished for me. I am married only to Islam and to the cause of my Muslim Brotherhood and the people of Palestine. Do not cry for me. I will be in Paradise and will be married there to my seventy hur al-ain, they are my brides. Often, in the hovels of the camps and destitution of our village, I have held before my eyes the unbearable beauty of these maidens. Their skin is like fine silk, through which you can see into another world, a better world, the world to come. Often in the stench and filth of this existence, I have breathed in their ethereal perfume and listened to their heavenly song. Do not cry for me one single tear, but eat sweets and dance. And of the one whose name cannot be mentioned, tell her there is no better end to the bitterness of oppression than this. For her, revenge! For you, the blessing of jihad!”