Can the Gods Cry?

by Allan Cameron

  “Twenty-one,” he replies, his face darkening and whatever good will he had fading quickly. “Your wife clearly makes it her business to be remarkably well informed. Does she know the reason why I won’t speak to him?”

  “Very possibly, but she asked me to ask you.”

  Rubinstein does not like the way this unknown woman appears to be manipulating their conversation from a distance, but he allows the conversation to take its course. “The reason is quite simple: he refuses to speak to me.”

  “He’s become a radical,” says the old lady grimly. “He wants us Jews to pay for what he calls ‘war crimes’. He’s holed up in a squat in East Jerusalem with some other down-and-outs, and you can’t get a word of sense out of him.”

  Rubinstein looks shattered. “It’s not something I want to talk about. If you’re interested, go and see him. He might speak to you, if you take your father-in-law.”

  “Oh yes, the father-in-law will go down very well,” says the old lady, whose sarcasm is unashamed. “They’ll probably make you an honorary member of their revolutionary group.”

  “Revolutionary group?”

  “Yes,” says Rubinstein in a tired voice, “it seems that he is mixed up with the people who last year kidnapped Michael Adler, the chairman of the Confederation of Palestinian Industries.”

  “Christ, he could be in prison.”

  “He could …”

  “… and they should throw away the keys,” the old lady interrupts.

  Rubinstein ignores her, “He could be and they only leave him out because he’s an Ibrahim and not a Yusuf. He’s got a big mouth and has no idea what he’s about. He’s more useful to them out of prison. With the noise he makes, they’ll never have any trouble finding him.”

  “My father-in-law knew them both,” says Leon.

  “Who? Your cousin and who else?”

  “No, Ibrahim and Yusuf. He was on the March of the Ten Thousand.”

  The old man brightens and turns to Mustapha; history has that power to ennoble even in the face of the most entrenched prejudices. “What did you say your name was?” he asks, but gets no reply other than a fixed stare.

  “Mustapha was on the Committee of Twenty,” Leon continues.

  “Was he now?” Rubinstein is genuinely respectful, as though in the company of, yes, an enemy, but also an enemy of high standing. Generals have something in common, even when on opposing sides.

  “I can take no credit for it,” Mustapha speaks at last. “It was purely a matter of chance.”

  “It is always a matter of chance,” Rubinstein smiles.

  “Mustapha says that Israeli soldiers crushed hundreds of peaceful protesters with their tanks,” Leon continues to push the point.

  “Of course they did,” the old man doesn’t hesitate. “Of course, everyone knew that at the time. We were led by idiots. They should never have killed Ibrahim, and they should have killed Yusuf immediately. Instead our highest politicians paid him court and ran after him like children. If only we had had a Yusuf! Every step he took was quickly calculated and carefully executed. Even his own death was engineered, I think. He knew that his death would seal the new status quo, and that his job was done. The Kach Party may have killed him, but he placed himself in their sights. There’s no doubt of that. At the right moment for him, he made it easy for them and they obliged. They were as stupid as the rest of us. We were thoroughly outsmarted.”

  “We were too damn nice,” the old lady is red with fury. “We killed Ibrahim, and we should have killed Yusuf, and we should have kept killing until they all went quiet. We had an army and they didn’t. Why did we lose our nerve?”

  “We are all Palestinians now, my love,” Rubinstein smiles at her calmly; the bitterness and cynical humour are there, but almost concealed, and their nuanced presence is carefully calculated. She looks pleased and hurt: hurt because those words – her being a Palestinian, even in some ironic sense – stir up and tighten her intestines; pleased because those other words – “my love” officially announce her position to one of the old man’s relations, even if it is the one who went and married an Arab.

  “I remember you,” Leon suddenly cries, shifting in his chair and horror passing across his face. “You’re Eva Argaman, the woman who hit the Palestinian shopper.” Everyone knows the details: she was the daughter of a wealthy family, not one of those funding the most extremist settlers but people with moderate views who supported the Peace Now movement. She became notorious for a single event that even now seemed to straighten her back against the pressures of age. A photo of her was discovered and published in the newspapers, and in it she is seen slapping an elderly Palestinian woman in the face. The woman is overweight and overburdened with plastic bags of what appear to be foodstuffs. On the back of the picture which she sent to a female colleague in the army, she wrote, “Teaching respect – the glory days!” A trophy picture, like so many, but unfortunately for her a decade later, her army friend was no longer her friend, and to repay some real or imagined slight she sent the picture to the papers.

  “You want to know how I could have possibly done such a thing? Am I right?” there is the slightest trace of defensiveness in her tone, something entirely missing up to this moment. “People don’t understand the times. Yes, I enjoyed my time in the army – I particularly enjoyed the friendship, the camaraderie. Young people can’t know what they’re missing: we were fighting against a common enemy and we were fighting hard. That brings you close together, very close.”

  “And at no cost, given that the common enemy had no weapons – no army, no navy, no air force,” Leon is now getting angry too. “A war in which you mete it out, and receive nothing back but the occasional homemade rocket exploding in the desert.”

  “We had casualties too, and civilian ones. What about the suicide bombers?”

  “You mean starting with Baruch Goldstein?” says Leon immediately.

  “He wasn’t a bomber!” she stops and realises she has said something stupid. More plaintively she says, “It was war. There were casualties on both sides. War is never fair. You cannot pull your punches.”

  He looks at her quizzically and holds her own self-confident gaze. She breaks first, exploding in a fit of anger, “You young people understand nothing. They gave our land away to the Arab. We could still be here and not in this hideous multicultural mishmash, if we had had more balls – we lost the one place where we could at last be Jewish without fear. We lost our dream.”

  “My wife was right to send me here. It has been painful, but I now know she was right. She wanted to teach me something and you two have certainly obliged – beyond all her hopes. I call my father-in-law father, and rightly so: he has wisdom.” This time Leon means it.

  They stand up to go and Rubinstein stays seated. He waves his hand as though shooing animals. “Go, go and don’t come back, Leon. I don’t want to see you or hear from you again. Go, go, get out of here. Go and see your cousin if you want. He lives at number thirty-five, Gamal Nasser Street, Jerusalem, an appropriate address for a renegade.”

  As they crunch their way back down the gravel drive, Leon and Mustapha are formulating different reactions to their encounter, principally because they belong to different generations.

  “How could he live with a woman like that,” Leon feels ashamed of this family connection.

  “How could she end up with a man like that,” Mustapha retorts. “Hundreds, thousands, even ten of thousands of Israelis did such things. That was a time when they were shooting children, like your grandfather did. Of course, she shouldn’t have slapped that woman. If she hadn’t kept the photograph and been so stupid as to send it to someone else, she would probably be pontificating about the horrors of those times, keeping a photo of Ibrahim on her wall and celebrating Unification Day with the rest of us. We are so plagued by photographs, because photographs enlarge not just an image but a moment. I prefer her to hypocrites and racists like your grandfather. The photograph only means that
in a given moment she was driven by the prevailing conformism to think that slapping an elderly woman was admissible. Things changed but the photograph trapped her in time and forced her to defend what she knows is indefensible. She is in part a victim of those times.”

  “Victim? Her?” Leon shakes his head in disbelief. “Let’s go home. We’ve done what Fatima wanted. And she got her result.”

  “I thought we were going to Jerusalem to see your cousin,” Mustapha objects.

  “You’re joking. Why would we want to do that?”

  It’s doubtful that the famous Egyptian leader would have been very happy to give his name to such an unassuming lane in the centre of the old town. Leon’s cousin, Baruch, is a gaunt youth with wavy hair and intense blue eyes. He acknowledges unenthusiastically the presence of Leon and his father-in-law. He saunters over to a corner of the room and signals to them to sit down on a sofa. “Nice of you to come, but a little rash. They’re probably opening a file on you this very minute.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The secret services.”

  “Well, it’ll make dull reading.”

  “Why have you come?”

  “Just curious. Our grandfather believes that you’re implicated in Michael Adler’s kidnap.”

  “Well, he’s wrong, but I don’t have any problem with the people who really did do it. This country needs to wake up to the past. It needs to acknowledge the crimes committed in the Occupied Territories before 2012.”

  “You’re crazy,” says Leon.

  “Then fuck off out of here.”

  “Young man,” Mustapha enters the conversation, “I don’t think you’re crazy. Not at all. It’s good that you want to make people aware of the past, but you can’t do it by kidnapping people. It doesn’t help. I admire your concern, but reject your methods.”

  Baruch looks troubled. He signals to a young woman who runs over. This one looks almost sick with intensity. Baruch introduces her as Eleanor and places a proprietorial arm on her shoulder.

  “This man is against our methods,” he points to Leon’s father-in-law with a gesture that lacks his earlier aggression.

  She however seems less accepting. “What’s your angle? What are you doing here?” Mustapha recognises that arrogance; she seems exactly like those young Israelis who in his youth demanded his papers as soon as he stuck his head out of the door – only now she is asking different questions and defending something else: the sanctity of his own people’s victimhood. He knew that it was going to be strange; that is why he insisted on coming. Curiosity, more than anything else, has driven him towards this meeting, but he didn’t think it would be this hard.

  “My son-in-law is Baruch’s cousin. This is a family encounter, but I am also interested in what he’s saying. You see, I was on the Committee of Twenty and I knew Ibrahim Safieh and Yusuf Khalidi.”

  “Well,” she sneers, “now I understand it all. Two men who betrayed their people. And you were one of their followers.”

  “Betrayed? But that is ridiculous.”

  “They left crimes unpunished and the criminals in possession of their booty. They were merely extensions of Western imperialism.”

  Baruch, who has now detached his arm from the girl’s shoulder, mutters, “Eleanor, that’s ridiculous.” He has appeared unimpressed by Mustapha’s historical connections, but he is nervous about the way she is grilling the old man, who is however capable of defending himself.

  “What did you gain?” she asks in a slightly less strident tone.

  “Almost everything. Compared with before. I agree that injustices remain, but nothing compared with what our lives had been like. And Israelis too were saved from themselves. Who knows what follies they could have committed? Where it could all have ended up? The Kach Party wanted some kind of final solution – a tragedy that would not only have heaped one terminal, delirious misery on the Palestinians, but endless, indelible, smaller ones on the Israelis themselves. This would have been the ultimate and inevitable lunacy of ‘ethnic’ nationalism… If you don’t get on with your neighbour, you don’t move home and you don’t burn his one down. You have to work it out, because at the end of the day you’re just reflections of each other. Our solution, like the South African one, means exactly that: we have to work it out. Together.”

  “So the Israelis should get away with their crimes?” asked Baruch.

  “I never thought I would hear those words from a Jew,” Mustapha laughed, “that is progress indeed.”

  “You think that I can’t transcend my people,” Baruch almost implored.

  “Why should you have to?” Mustapha retorted. “No one is their people, and any people is made up of all sorts. There are times in history when a people – perhaps a people like any other – can be caught up in some mad ideology that drives quite large percentages to behave badly – brutally – shamelessly, use what word you like, but I now can see that this never goes on forever. Humanity always raises its head, weakly perhaps but unfailingly. Don’t take too much on yourselves. Just hearing you admitting to this past is for me a liberation. I don’t want you to go much further. Kidnapping, no. And don’t have anything to do with those who do! You seem like nice young people.” Mustapha knows that this last piece of unintended condescension has been a mistake as soon as he says it.

  Eleanor looks furious and shifts on her skinny legs. She looks more like a frightened deer sniffing the air for danger than a revolutionary seeking to overthrow what she considers still to be a racist state. “Don’t you believe in progress, and that some people need to risk their lives to achieve it?”

  “Haven’t we already made some progress?” says Mustapha. “Peace, open borders? At least now you can drive from Tel Aviv for an evening in Beirut. No war, not even a customs post, just one straight road. A motorway. Surely that is progress?”

  “Is that your idea of progress – access to a good restaurant? What about justice?” says Baruch, joining the conversation on what he feels is safer ground.

  “Justice is fine,” says Mustapha, “but its rigid application can lead to more injustice. We should leave absolute justice to God, who is in the business of absolutes. We human beings have to be more pragmatic. I once thought that we had to get all our land and houses back, just as Jews got back all the property confiscated by the Nazis. But then I realised that they didn’t: that is, the rich got it back when they could, but all the poorer Jews, workers and peasants with small plots of land and the odd house, they never got compensation of any kind. We’re like them: we, on the whole, were poor people and our assets were few: an olive grove, a house, a pasture, pieces of rudimentary agricultural equipment. We’re not going to be compensated either. I don’t say that it’s right, but that’s the way of the world. Money goes to money; always has and probably always will. I can live with injustice, just as many Jews, Gypsies and others lived with injustice in Europe. The important thing is peace. You don’t understand that, because you’re young and want to put the world to rights before you’re forty. It can’t be done. I admire your stand. I hope you get somewhere, only I repeat: don’t bring violence back. The rich never pay for that – Arab or Jew – the rich never pay. The poor always pay for violence, even when it’s done in their name; it leads to a crazy tit-for-tat over differences that don’t count. There is no difference between human beings that justifies violence.”

  “Not even the difference between rich and poor?”

  “Not even that.”

  “This is insane. You an Arab saying these things,” Baruch looks upset. “This society has got to wake up to the past. And we are the people to make it happen.”

  Leon, who has been listening with detachment and an increasing admiration for his father-in-law, suddenly looks alarmed: “Baruch, why are you saying these things? Is it because of our grandfather and what he did?”

  “Oh, everyone’s angry with my grandfather now. Yes, what he did was wrong. Very wrong. He killed an eight-year-old boy, probably to remove a witn
ess. I am not defending him; he is scum, but who amongst the Israelis cared at the time? No one. Now they go on as though he was a monster, a child-killer, but who cared at the time? No one. They were all complicit.”

  “You’re right. I don’t doubt it, but …” said Leon.

  “No one cared a damn. They were all complicit,” Baruch repeated obsessively.

  “Well, not all. There were some – very few, I agree – people who were brave enough to …”

  “Bullshit! They were all complicit. From top to bottom,” Baruch’s eyes blaze with irrational anger – irrational that is, if you haven’t lived his life. “The whole fucking lot of that rotten society from the army judges and lawyers to the whistle-blowing soldiers who could have brought the boy’s killer to book, but fell at the last hurdle – at the closed session when they retracted everything.”

  “What are you saying? That our grandfather should have gone to prison at the time of the event?”

  “Of course he should! What are you saying, you idiot? He killed a little boy and had a hand in killing entirely harmless labourers. If you’re not sent to prison for that, then you might as well close all the damn prisons. There’s nothing worse.”

  “But he’s our grandfather, and as you say …”

  “If they’d sent him to prison, as they should have, I wouldn’t exist and, what’s more, my mother would not have lived, would not have suffered and would not have died the way she did – victim of the belated self-righteousness of the Israeli people. I wouldn’t have been brought up by my racist grandfather. Don’t give me that stuff about things being more complicated… We were all tainted and still are. Three or four generations, remember. I won’t have any kids; they would be child-killers’ kids.”

  “Why so angry, young man?” Mustapha said. “It was all over long ago. Even then it made no sense to be this angry. Anger and hatred never solved anything.”

  “Don’t give me that facile crap!” Baruch sneered, bereft of words to express the magnitude of a thought constructed not from experience but from unremembered fragments of anger – the shards of a world that shattered long before he was born.