Bloodline (41 page)

“What should I do, friend—announce myself at your door for all to hear?”

“Sit, refresh yourself,” said Samuel, pouring him a glass of wine. “How was the assault in the Galilee?”

Jonathan looked downcast. “We lost six good men and several have been wounded. But the Romans have a bloody nose. We must have killed fifty. When I left, they were sending out waves of troops into the hills to try to find where we were hiding, but we know the paths and the caves as well as we know our wives' bodies, and they returned to their barricades empty-handed. The more wounds we inflict on them, the more weapons we steal from them, the angrier they become—and angry men don't fight as well as men who are calm and determined.”

Samuel smiled and said, “I'm sorry some of ours died, but I had some generals here before, and they're becoming increasingly worried by what you and the other Zealots are doing. They've even given your men a name. They've called you after your daggers; no longer are you robbers or brigands, but you're now officially Iscariots. How do you like being Jonathan the Iscariot?”

The Zealot smiled, and shrugged. “I'm a Zealot, and proud of it.”

They drank their wine, and Samuel said quietly, “I think I've found the man for you. He treated some members of my household and is skilled in the arts of healing. He's been trained in Rome and Greece, and so he probably speaks the Roman tongue better than me. He's what we've been looking for.”

Jonathan the Zealot nodded. “Will he come willingly? Is he a patriot?”

“He has no love of Rome. Whether he'll follow you or whether he'll need to be dragged is something you'll have to determine.”

Y
AEL WAITED
for Mahmud to arrive with the unconscious Bilal. She ordered the prison guard to stand outside the doors to the private room. In the corridor, the guard pulled over a chair and sat reading the afternoon newspaper.

Within moments Mahmud arrived and dismissed the emergency porter with thanks. He pushed Bilal into the room, his hand resting on one arm of the youth's prostrate body. For what seemed a long moment, once the door was closed and they were alone in the room, they looked at each other. Silently they acknowledged what they were doing, the roles they were playing, and the consequences that might come for them both.

Then Yael quickly bent over Bilal's body. He was still involuntarily shaking and looked pallid and horribly unhealthy. Now that they were alone, she gave him an intravenous injection of the parasympathomimetic drug physostigmine to reverse the disastrous effects of the anticholinergic drug she'd given him in prison.

Within ten minutes he had stopped shaking, color was beginning to return to his cheeks, his body was beginning to warm, and when he looked at her, he remembered who she was.

His voice was raspingly dry, but he said, “I thought I was going to die.”

She put her finger to her lips and whispered into his ear, “Shush, Bilal. I don't want people to think that you're getting better, or they'll take you back to prison. My friend here will take you away to safety.” She didn't know why, but for reassurance she whispered into his ear, “My friend is a Palestinian.”

Bilal's eyes darted to Mahmud standing on the opposite side of the bed. Mahmud smiled.

“Is the guard on the door?” Bilal whispered.

She nodded.

“Then how?”

She smiled and said, “You'll see.”

She gave him a reassuring squeeze on the arm, but she was feeling anything but reassured herself. This would be the end of her career if it was ever found out what she'd done. Career? She smiled strangely to herself. It would be the end of her freedom. She'd be in prison for years. And she'd drag a thoroughly good man, Mahmud, into prison as well.

Suddenly she felt her iPhone tremble in silence in her pocket, delivering a message. It was a simple communication of one word: “Now.”

She bent over Bilal and whispered into his ear, “I'm sorry about this, Bilal, but I'm going to give you another injection that will put you to sleep. I swear it won't hurt.”

He trusted her and he nodded. She pulled a small case from her pocket, unzipped it, took out a syringe, and rubbed his arm with alcohol. Then she pushed the needle into his arm.

Yael walked smartly out of the room and to the nurses' station. “Can you prepare Theater G? I have to do an exploratory on that Palestinian kid. I think his kidneys are in meltdown. Ask the theater nurse to get a team together.”

She walked back to the guard on Bilal's door, who was still
reading the paper. “I think that he's suffering from a secondary rupture to the angiomyolipoma that we treated him for before he went to your prison. If I'm right, he's got a massive bleed into his abdomen. He'll die of septicemia unless I stop the blood and the poisons bleeding into his body from the rupture. Are you okay to stay here? I can't allow you into the theater.”

The guard nodded. “Sure. I can't stand the sight of blood. Hospitals make me ill.”

She smiled. “This man will wheel him down to the theater.” She gestured to Mahmud.

The guard looked at him, then at Bilal's door. “May I?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He opened the door and saw that Bilal was in bed, asleep, and looking terrible. “I'll go to the canteen and have lunch, if that's okay with you.”

“He'll be at least five hours in surgery.”

The guard nodded. She smiled as he left the floor to go to the cafeteria.

When the guard was gone, Mahmud seized the trolley and pushed open the door, maneuvering Bilal out of the ward to the elevators. Within another two minutes the elevator descended to the basement of the hospital, where an ambulance was waiting for them. Mahmud pushed the gurney with Bilal lying comatose past a dozen people, who barely glanced at them. He and Yael had a story ready, which they'd rehearsed before Bilal had arrived, and which Mahmud would deliver in a heavy Arabic accent; he'd tell anybody who asked that he was taking the patient for treatment to a specialist decontamination unit in Shaare Zedek Hospital, as the doctors thought he might have been poisoned by radioactive polonium.

But nobody stopped him, and he wheeled the lad out of the rear entrance and straight into the back of a waiting private ambulance. Mahmud secured Bilal's trolley, then dashed to the front seat and started the large gurgling engine.

Mahmud drove out of the hospital grounds at a modest pace, mentally willing the large ambulance to be as inconspicuous as possible. He looked in the rearview mirror to survey the open chamber of the ambulance and could see Bilal's dark features. He lay there with his eyes closed. Nothing would be the same after this and as Mahmud steered the vehicle out of Jerusalem and set course for Peki'in, he wondered what the fate of this young man he was risking so much for would be.

W
HEN
Y
AEL ARRIVED
at the theater, scrubbed and ready for the operation, she pushed open the heavy overlapping polyethylene doors, entered, and looked at the operating table.

“Where is he?” she asked quizzically.

“I was hoping you could answer that,” said her anesthetist. “We've been waiting for him.”

“Has anybody phoned the ward?” she asked.

“Sure. They said he'd been brought down half an hour ago. We've been to the other theaters and he's not in any of them,” said the nurse. “We phoned the porters and they said they'd been given no instructions to collect a patient from Surgical. What the hell's going on, Yael? Who is this patient?”

“It's Bilal, the kid with gunshot wounds; the kid who was brought from prison . . .” She suddenly became silent and looked concerned. “Jesus,” she said urgently.

The entire operating room suddenly became very still and quiet. All eyes were on her as she stood in the middle of the room in her operating scrubs, thinking deeply to herself, trying to work out something seemingly impossible. She looked back at everybody; she frowned; they could see that her mind was in a state of disbelief.

“Call Security,” she barked. “Jesus, the little bastard's escaped . . .”

And she hoped that her reaction was convincing.

F
UAD AND
M
ARYAM
knew that Bilal had been taken to the Jerusalem Hospital. The prison authorities had contacted them and informed them that their son was very sick. Maryam, especially, had been hysterical and demanded that they go to Jerusalem, but Fuad insisted that they wait.

So when the letter was delivered anonymously, it came as a hideous shock. And the note about Bilal's death, delivered to his parents the previous day, had been the height of cruelty for its inhuman brevity. In fact, Yael could think of nothing more painful and punishing than to send a note to parents telling them that their son was dead. Worse still for his mother and father were the details Yaniv had typed: that Bilal had been executed by the Islamic Resistance in Palestine for his treachery. But in a supreme irony, right at this moment, Bilal's death would be the only thing that would keep all three of them alive.

Fuad and Maryam were in a state of confusion. One day their son was so sick he was being rushed to the hospital; the next day they received a letter telling them that he'd been executed as a traitor by men of their faith. With Fuad and Maryam bereft and incapable of understanding, the imam took over that moment of their lives and arranged for the funeral.

Yael had never before been to an Islamic house in mourning. As the day began, she'd done her best to ensure that she wasn't followed and went shopping in the Arab
shuk
, where she bought a black hijab and a long dark-blue Arabic gown. She booked a taxi to drive her to the village of Bayt al Gizah, and while waiting she put on the clothes, which instantly changed her from being a modern Israeli to an Arab woman.

Yael lowered the hijab over her brow and draped it across her face, watching in the mirror as her identity slipped away. How much her world had changed. Would anything ever be the same again? She looked at her hands, picturing the blood flowing
through veins and capillaries, blood she shared with the young man the letter had pronounced dead; he was a terrorist, and yet he was a man she had broken the law to save.

Everything she thought she was, and where she had come from—everything that once was certain—was now sand shifting under her feet. She stood in front of the mirror and looked at her new self. Those people who had once seemed so foreign and so far away were now a part of her as she would be judged by anybody seeing her as a part of them. And she was afraid.

The taxi driver, not used to leaving the Jewish western part of Jerusalem, found it difficult to reach Bilal's parents' house but eventually got there. One glance told her that it had changed even in the few days since she'd last visited—as had the neighborhood. When she was there the first time, eyes were everywhere, watching her, following her, boring into her in suspicion, focusing their anger on her. This time there were no eyes. People on the street didn't even look at her. As a Jewish doctor, she was an alien in this village; now, dressed as an Arab, she was no longer “the Other.”

She walked up the pathway and saw that the door was open. Inside were dozens of people—men, women, and children—sitting cross-legged on the floor, some on mats, some on the bare wood. There was a low moan, almost a hum, coming from the crowd. The men were dressed in dark shirts and black trousers, the women in black robes. Almost all of the women, except for the young girls, were wearing either a hijab or the full niqab. Their eyes looked at her but didn't register anything. She was invisible to them.

She entered the house and made her way down the front hallway to the inner rooms, where Fuad was seated on a low stool surrounded by dozens of men; close to him was the imam, who glanced up momentarily but then looked down again when he saw that Yael was only a woman.

She continued farther into the house to where the women, in
another adjoining room, were sitting on the floor surrounding Maryam. Though it might be culturally insensitive, she wanted to pay her respects to both parents. They thought their Bilal was dead; she knew he wasn't, yet she had to pretend, to try to ease their grief.

Yael knew that she couldn't enter the room of the men, so she entered the room of the women, and some of them looked at her and then back at Maryam. Bilal's mother looked older, thinner, and more haggard than the sprightly woman Yael had first met only days before. Maryam's eyes were red from crying, her cheeks rough, and she had the hollow, withdrawn look of a mother who was bereft and uncomprehending.

Yael bent down to kiss her and pay her respects, but when their eyes met, Maryam looked shocked. Yael put her fingers to her lips and Maryam nodded. But before their embrace ended, Maryam held Yael around the neck and whispered, “Those who ordered Bilal to be taken from the hospital and killed him—they are in this house. It is they who have killed him. You know this. The imam . . . Fuad has to sit with him because we are in mourning, but my husband's anger is so great that I fear for us. Fuad is so hurt that he's threatened to go to the Jews and tell them. But that will mean our deaths. When the mourners leave, we will be alone. I beg you to help me.”

Yael so desperately wanted to tell her that her beloved Bilal wasn't dead, but she knew that to do so would be a catastrophe. She kept reminding herself of the absurdity: the only way to keep him alive was to convince people he was dead.

“How can I help you, Maryam? What can I do?” she whispered. She looked into Maryam's bloodshot eyes and felt a pang of distress. How much more suffering could this poor woman take?

“We must leave here,” Maryam whispered, her voice even lower so that nobody could overhear. “We must leave Bayt al Gizah. Since this imam, he is poisoning the minds of the boys.
He is dividing our village. If Fuad does what he wants to do, the imam will have him killed. I'm certain. I have now lost two of my sons because of him. Bilal is dead and my other son is in prison. I can't lose any more children, nor Fuad. Please help me.”