But then I realized it was actually something in my back pocket pushing me up, pressing into my skin, something sharp and hard. I dug into the pocket and found, of all things, a book.
It had a lovely felt cover the color of wet hay. I didn’t remember ever having this book, or ever putting it in my pocket, but there it was. It had the seductive aroma of horses and school glue, and in my hands it was as supple as cashmere. I ran my fingers across the cover, as one might the skin of a new-shorn sheep, wondering at it. I held it to my cheek. I brought it to my lips. I touched it to my forehead.
Then I opened it. Flowers and birds and leaves and stars and hearts came rushing out at me, dancing before my eyes in a brilliant rainbow of crayon and pencil, watercolor and pen, a whole botanical garden blooming in my hands.
MY THOUGHTS ON COMING FACE-TO-FACE WITH DEATH
BY ROMAN GUTTMAN
SPRING 1996
And below that, near the very bottom of the right-hand corner, in letters festooned with roses, pansies, and carnations:
CREATED BY (THE ONE AND ONLY!)
ANNA ROMANOVNA GUTTMAN
XXXXXOOOOO!!!!!!
I caressed each letter with my fingertips, and for the first time since I was a child in Moscow, tears welled up in my eyes. And yet they would not shed. I put my hand to my face. It felt foreign to me, like burnt paper. My God, I said to myself, I have to drink water. Water.
It was then the door opened, and Abdul-Latif entered. In his hand was his knife, the curve of which shone bright like the sun.
Oh, my father, act! The great dawn of revenge is upon us.
But I am not to witness it! For in the book Anyusha made, I have seen my own fate! The letters of her name, she drew in the colors of Paradise, and therein I divine the message for which I have been waiting, spelled out in a language I cannot read. Anyusha! It is not your father I am meant to guard but al-Haram al-Qudsi al-Sharif, our beloved al-Aqsa! That is my task! At last!
Father, Father, I must fly. May Allah reward you with good. I can do nothing for you. And as for the Jew, Roman Guttman, it is too late. He cries for water but has not the strength to walk, not even the strength to crawl, and though the water is but a hair’s length from his lips, he shall not drink it.
Farewell! I fly to my reward!
Chapter Twenty-six
“THIS IS MY SON’S KNIFE,” he said to me. “Do you think I don’t know who you are?”
“His knife?” I managed to say.
“We call it a jambiya. I don’t know where he got such a thing. They gave it to him. Then they gave it to me. This is what I have left of him.”
“Please,” I said. Or tried to say.
Suddenly he thrust the knife in my face. I wanted to turn away, but with his other hand he grabbed my head and pressed the blade just beneath my eye. A rivulet of blood fled down my cheek. “Why did you come here?” he howled. “Did you think you would be welcome here? Outside, they don’t know who you are. They don’t care. They see only that you are a Jew. But I know who you are. Do you think I do not know the names of every single one of you? Why did you come? Tell me!” The knife twisted between his fingers and deeper into my skin.
I wanted to tell him why, but nothing came out but dry spit.
“Speak!” he said.
“Dasha Cohen” is what I finally muttered.
“What?”
I didn’t have the energy to repeat it, so I closed my eyes and told him with my thoughts. Because suddenly, in the gloom of this house, in the bed of the killer, in the hands of my murderer, it was quite clear to me.
It was the day I had first seen Colonel Vasin.
He showed me a pile of her letters. So what? I thought. I cavalierly flipped open the first one. I even smiled at him. But this was not one of the letters I had read in Collette’s apartment. It must have been written in Lefortovo. Overflowing with desperation and grief, it exploded in my hands. She was pregnant. That is what Vasin wanted me to see. She was pregnant, and it could not possibly be mine. Yet the letter was addressed to me.
“Perhaps,” he said, “this will change your attitude.”
When he was done with me, I fled his office and ran through the streets I had known since childhood as through a labyrinth, blindly slamming into corners and dead ends. Finally, I simply stopped running. To my amazement, I was standing in front of the little café on Dzerzhinsky Square where we all used to meet and where I had first set eyes upon Collette. Unlike on that frigid day now so long ago, the windows were not steamed up, and the door was propped open to let in a little cool fresh air. I ordered a coffee and sat at the table near the window to look out onto the square as we used to do.
The coffee was mere sludge, but I kept sucking at it until my mouth was full of bitterness. I grabbed a cigarette and held it between my teeth unlit and stared out the window.
Why me? What did I have to do with a child?
There was a small commotion a few tables away. A woman, blond and pink-skinned and slightly pudgy in that sensual Russian way, was scolding a little girl who had refused to eat her sturgeon sandwich. This was no apparatchik’s wife with painted nails and smuggled blue jeans—just an ordinary woman, a clerk or a cashier. Her daughter wore the usual pigtails with white bows, the white apron and heavy brown shoes, but her socks were bright red and so were her shoelaces. She was only three or four, but already I could see she was one to be reckoned with. Her mother desperately tried to keep her voice down, but the idea of such a waste of money finally overwhelmed her and she cried out, “Dasha! Who do you think you are, the tsarevna? Eat your fish!” But little Dasha crossed her arms in front of her and turned up her nose in a gesture of utter contempt. I was certain her mother would wallop her then and there, but instead she began to laugh. The pose her daughter had struck—so grievously insulted, so regally above it all—was just too much. She laughed a mother’s laugh and suffused that miserable café with a kind of holy music: the pleasure she took in her daughter’s willfulness, the joy she experienced in the flight of that little bird, her child. At last she managed to say, “Very well, Dasha, what about a napoleon?” Dasha’s eyes lit up in anticipation of the custard and the chocolate and the layers of pastry, and I saw something I had forgotten existed in the world: delight, pure and simple. Delight in this place, in this time, in the banquet that was set before us.
Dasha ate her napoleon very slowly, exulting in every bite. When she was done, her mother—who had wrapped the spurned slice of sturgeon and white bread within a sheet of newspaper and stowed it in her purse—gathered up her things and said, “Come, my starling, let’s go home.” The little one rose, licked her fork one last time, and took her mother’s hand.
I couldn’t help myself—I called out to her, “Dasha! Tell me, was the napoleon that good?”
But by then they were out the door and instantly carried along by the stream of pedestrians flowing along the great thoroughfare. I looked at her empty plate, at the fork licked clean, at the crumpled paper napkin smeared with chocolate, and I knew, knew in the deepest part of me, that I wanted that, too—and I wanted it with all my heart.
I’d forgotten that episode in the café, forgotten all about it—until the day in the hospital when I saw that girl on the news and they announced her name.
Of course it wasn’t the same girl! I knew that absolutely. And yet—and yet. I could not help believing, and believe to this day, that the child who had shed so much light in the darkest of my days had finally been punished for my sins.
I opened my eyes again, and Abdul-Latif was crying.
“I don’t understand why you are here, if only to torment me. Why torment me? My son is dead. You think there is glory in his death? Only idiots think there is glory. For me there is only sorrow. Only sorrow. You come here to increase my pain? You cannot increase.”
“No, no,” I said. “No more pain.” And now I did call upon every fiber of strength within me, and I pushed myself up on my elbows, and took the point of his blade i
n my hand and pushed it down toward the floor and said to him, “I, too, have a child. I want to go home to her.”
Without another word, he slipped his arms around me and lifted me up and helped me, step by step, to the back door and into my own car, which was waiting there.
When the crowd heard the car start, they came running, their screams filling the air around them, but Abdul-Latif waved the knife in the air and cried, “I am the father of the shahid! This is his holy jambiya! Make way for my will!” And the men parted before him.
We drove along at breakneck speed through the little village and out onto the rough highway. All the while I held Anyusha’s book in my hands. All those pages she had left blank now seemed filled in. I’d had no idea she’d made that journal for me, but we were always on the same page, Anyusha and I, always walking in the same direction. And now my only desire was to return to her, to tell her the truth of her life, and set her free.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I SEE HER THERE, with her blasphemous red sneakers! Look, her leggings are pink-and-white stripes! The tiny skirt she is wearing is fringed like a cowboy’s vest. She is wearing cheap plastic bracelets of colors so bright they remind me of the fancy cocktails I used to drink. And look, her fingers are deluged with rings, just like an Arab woman’s—but her face is as white as salt, and the mop of stuff she calls hair, as black and shapeless as a moonless night, is like a spider coming to rest on the top of her head.
She is so small! Her arms are two delicate anemone, and her walk is awkward, like a giraffe’s, for her feet are too large for her body. She can barely lug her backpack and stops every few steps, but not because she is tired. She just likes to look at the people on the plaza below, to study the face of some little child, as if looking at an angel, or to listen to the bitter drone of the Jewish rabbis echoing off their famous Wailing Wall. Now she stops again, this time merely to examine the cracks in the stone pavement, then she stops again to add a little lipstick to her lips, pink and glittery, almost as if she had dusted her mouth with diamonds, and now she stops again, just to look up at the sky.
Little Anyusha, where is this cruelty coming from? Do you not understand the Muslims will never abandon al-Aqsa? Never relinquish it? You will shed the blood of every single believer in Jerusalem, and more will come to take their places. You will explode the Dome of the Rock, or burn the pillars of al-Aqsa from within, reduce them to rubble and trash, but Caliph Umar will return from the grave to clear the rubble and trash with his own hands, for this is the Mosque of David that the Prophet visited on his Night Journey, this, the farthest mosque, where your people were condemned and ours elevated. It has been given to us by our God, and you, little Anyusha, cannot take it back.
Can’t you hear me? I am coming at you, buzzing you like a fly, stinging you like a wasp. Take no more steps! Throw down your backpack! Return to your anonymity in the suburbs of Tel Aviv where the trees grow thick as grass, and the Indian almond scents the air, and the nightingale sings you to sleep, and the pitango and shahor ripen into thick sour fruits—think of them and go back! Can you not see me? My blood drips from the sinew of my neck, and my lips are coated in melted asphalt, and my eyes have hardened into bone—do I not frighten you?
She is going down each step, slowly marking her way with song. What is she singing? My love, watch how the day fades like a dream, and if you feel that I am far away, don’t be afraid … It’s that Ehud Banai. The debased rock-and-roll of Israel. Why is she not singing a prayer or a psalm or reciting a verse of her Bible or her Talmud, but a silly love song for starstruck teenagers that in any case is yesterday’s garbage? Her socks go up only to her ankles, and the pink-striped leggings only down to the middle of her calf, so that a narrow ribbon of flesh is visible, burnished with threadlets of fine hair that sparkle in the sun. This little sliver of skin—what is it?
She approaches the guard post now, with its bulletproof windows and lazy Magav officers. They take one look at her and wave her through, glancing absently into her backpack as it rolls through the X-ray. She stops to chat with them, I don’t know what she’s saying, but they laugh, all three of them, and then she is on her way down to the plaza.
Now I assail her, like a bee, like a jet plane, swooping around her head, but she does not even notice me. Allah, All Merciful and Compassionate, I fall upon my face, which is all that I have left, and beg of you—how can I stop her? I lay this very head in front of her feet to trip her and cause her to fall down onto the pavement, but she steps over me as if I am not there. I fling myself like a sharpened arrow at her heart, but she smiles. She stops and takes a drink of Mei Eden water from a plastic bottle. She walks on, almost skipping but for the burden of her pack, and she looks like any schoolgirl loaded down with textbooks, shoulders hunched forward, lumbering yet weightless.
She now approaches the Mughrabi Ascent. Perhaps I should fly up to the gate, warn the waqf guards, but I cannot seem to move. I hover above the young Anyusha Guttman, just as I did above her slumbering father. What wrong have I committed? I have testified there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet, I have said salah each day in its time, I have paid zakat as much as I could and even more. I have done jihad. I have been a shahid. My name is on a poster. Look, I can see it now: Amir Hamid, fine looking, thin-featured, boyish even at twenty-one, brand-new suit, holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and a grenade in the other. I’m standing guard atop al-Aqsa itself, holding my grenade in one hand and my AK-47 in the other. I straddle the whole of al-Aqsa, I’m even larger than the mosque I intend to protect! Well then? Why am I not allowed to protect it?
She is already in the line of tourists, making her way up the ramp. Up, up she goes. She hears nothing but the voice of her purpose. I know that voice well. If I could only make her hear something else. If only she could hear how the pigeons are squawking and the feet are shuffling and the stones are creaking and the trees are whistling. But her ears are shut tight with the wax of her one God.
Anyusha! Listen! Listen to me! You who heard the voice of the scarab and the lizard, the voice of the bicycle and the cardboard box, the voice of the doorknob and the flower pot—why can’t you hear my voice?
She approaches the gate now. The waqf guards sitting on their plastic chairs, eyeing the tourists. They’re not afraid of bombs—why should they be? They’re on the lookout for Christians, to confiscate their Bibles, to catch them moving their lips in prayer so they can evict them. That’s their job! Bombs? The efficient and terrifying Israeli border police have already checked for bombs. And for guns, for knives, too, because in their hearts the waqf know that all police are the same, wanting nothing but a nice day and no upsetting incidents, and so they go about their business watching for someone muttering the Lord’s Prayer.
Anyusha! Can’t you hear the colored tiles of Qubbat as-Sakhrah complaining about the weather? Can’t you hear the butterflies discuss their hurt feelings? Can’t you hear the carpets in the entryway of the mosque moaning softly? Can’t you hear the doors of the Golden Gate yearning to be opened? Surely you can hear the kaffiah on that old man coo in the breeze and declare how much it is enjoying the afternoon sun?
Oh these voices! Far below the Dome of the Rock, the dead are rising already, preparing to say their salahs. The soldiers’ rifles are uncomfortable in the heat, and say so, but the peach that the old woman is eating is laughing out loud, and, Anyusha, your backpack is weeping, can you not hear it?
But I hear it. I hear it. I hear the voices on the bus that just pulled up to the stop at which I am standing, my hand on my detonator, and I hear all their conversations at once, each one distinct as a note on a piano, and I even hear the words speaking their own words to one another, and I hear the tires on the bus fretting under the weight, and I hear the mirrors on the bus bemoaning what has just passed from sight, and I hear all around me the anxiety of the traffic lights, and the cleverness of the motor scooters, and the contemplation of the cups and saucers at the café across the str
eet, and the laughing of the sherut as it passes the bus, and the resignation of the stuffed bear in the little boy’s bag, and the pride of the milk in the baby bottle and the bewilderment of the finches in the poinciana tree, and the window of the office behind me, tall and stately, bragging about itself to its neighbors, and the rhapsody in the mind of the Arab gardeners, and the priggish vanity of the kadaif in the bakery window, and from the apartments nearby the chatter of stuffed peppers and schnitzels, and from the sky the happiness of the airplanes and the confusion of a pair of dragonflies, and from the new building going up the vaunting of the girders and the loneliness of the Thai workers, and from the young women sashaying down the avenue the song of their earrings, and from the ground below my feet the earth itself laughing, laughing, laughing.
And now my finger cannot press the unlock button on the ignition key of the Mercedes-Benz, and my belt of C-4, which has been loudly cursing me all day, suddenly falls silent, and I step back from the curb, and I sit on the bench, and I hear my own heart ululating. It all goes backward, and none of it ever happened, and I am still just a boy in my father’s garage, and Fadi is alive and smoking Time cigarettes, and Dasha Cohen is just arriving from Odessa holding her mother’s hand, and Nadirah is teasing me in the garden of my uncle’s house.
O Allah, You have blessed me with a great blessing! O Allah, I am free of You!
But I look up, and where is Anyusha? Wait! She has stopped! She is a frozen thing, a pillar of salt holding her knapsack, looking at her feet as if they were made of jewels. Suddenly she retreats down the slope, clutching her evil bag, and runs back to the Wailing Wall where the Jews in their black throngs are keening. See her! Little golden Anyusha pushes her way into the crowd of men. This one looks at her, that one, then another, but she does not seem to care. They call out after her, “You! Little girl! Stop!” And in English, “Stop, you girl, stop now!” But she doesn’t stop, she begins to run, runs up to the wall where only the men are praying. And they run after her, screaming, “Stop! Stop!”
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