Journal of a UFO Investigator (30 page)

Her eyes were wide open, as usual. She didn't cry or wail; no sound, except that dreadful breathing. Jameela kissed her eyes and wept and went off into the darkness. “
Ma'a-salaameh
,” I called out, which is how you say good-bye in Arabic. But Jameela didn't answer.

 

We stood alone by the edge of the valley. The taxi's taillights vanished in the distance. No moon; only the black sky, the gleaming stars.

“Turn off the flashlight,” Rochelle said.

The breeze, which had blown a faint odor of garbage from the valley, died down. The air was again still and sweet. I heard in the darkness the soft, familiar sound of her unbuttoning her blouse.

“Don't go yet,” she said.

Perhaps I could begin to see her—perhaps I heard it, or somehow felt it—but I knew she was taking a chain off her neck.

“Give me your hand.”

I reached out, and she took my hand, held it tight, pressed the chain into it. I felt against my palm the six sharp points of a Star of David.

“I've worn it underneath,” she said. “From the day I got here.”

“Rochelle. Oh, Rochelle—”

“You'll give it back,” she said. “Next time we meet.”

 

A rectangle of light glowed in the distance. A lighted window, somewhere in the Israeli section of Abu Tor. I took it as my beacon.

I heard the land mine explode a hundred times over as I ran. A thousand times I felt it. I felt my limbs, torn from each other, hanging bloody on the spiny bushes of Hell Valley. I saw the child I'd been carrying, naked and helpless, gasping out her life on the flinty ground as the sun rose over the Jordanian hills.

The light grew larger as I stumbled through rocks and brambles. At last I began to believe we were nearly there, nearly safe. When I heard the popping in my ears, I didn't grasp that it was gunfire. It took me even longer to understand I was the one they were shooting at.

I set my course toward that window.

Who are you that you sit up in your room in the dead of night?

Are you reading, perhaps, because you can't sleep? In your bed, do images come of your mother tossing back and forth like you, insomniac, her heart struggling to pump its blood, her lungs straining to draw in the air? Do you dream now, awake? Do you write in your journal to comfort yourself, to keep yourself from the worse dreams that will come when you slide off into sleep?

Whatever it is—please—stay at your desk.

Don't stop reading; don't stop writing.

Don't go back to bed.

Don't turn off the light.

“SHE'S GOT TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL,” I SAID LOUDLY. “DO
you understand? We've got to take her to the hospital.”

I held up my hands—maybe to gesture, maybe to reach out toward my child. The handcuffs rattled on my wrists. The soldier on my left forced them back down. He pushed me, not very roughly, to keep me walking. Somewhere ahead, a ceiling bulb shone dimly.

“All right, all right, we take her,” said the soldier on my right, whose name was Shimon. “Now you shut your mouth, OK?”

The soldier on the left burst out laughing. So he did understand English. The son of a bitch. When they first captured me, I'd babbled to him about how my child was terribly sick and needed to go to the hospital right away, and he just stared as if he had no idea what I was saying. Then he turned and spit on the ground.

As for the third man, the tall, muscular sergeant whom the others called Yehoshua, he seemed not to know any English at all. He carried my baby, still wrapped in her blanket, as he strode ahead of us down the dark corridor. The walls echoed the sound of her breathing. I would have called out to him, but I knew it wasn't any use. Again I tried Shimon. “
Hos
-pital,” I said. “You understand?
Hos
-pital. She must go right
now
. She's s
ick
. Very sick.”

“You say that twenty times already,” said Shimon. “Thirty maybe.”

“It's
important.
It's very
important
—”

“Listen,” said Shimon, “I know what is
hospital
, OK? I been in hospital myself. You be in hospital yourself now if we didn't find you. Dead maybe.”

I knew what he meant. After they'd begun shooting, and I'd realized they were aiming at me, I had cried out: “Don't shoot. I'm an American!” They stopped firing. They shone a searchlight on me and used it to guide me up out of the valley. “Now left!” they screamed. “Now right!” And on more than one occasion, when I tried to walk straight ahead: “No, no, no, no!”

“You walk on
mokaysh
,” Shimon said to me. “
Mokaysh
go
boom”
—he illustrated the violence of the explosion by stopping still in the corridor and waving his arms in all directions—“you go into hospital all right.”

The sergeant turned and roared something at us. He waved his arm impatiently. Shimon started walking again. The soldier on my left pushed me to walk faster.

“You come out of hospital,” Shimon said, “you got no legs. No
baytzeem
either, maybe.”

“No
baytzeem
?” I said. “No eggs?”

That was the only meaning I had known for the Hebrew word until then.

The soldier on my left whooped with laughter. Shimon laughed too.

“Maybe he already doesn't have any
baytzeem
,” the soldier on my left said to Shimon. “Maybe that's why he doesn't understand.”

 

“Your new home,” said Shimon. “You like it?”

It was a tiny, dank cell, about eight by ten feet. It had no window. We'd gone down a flight of steps when we first entered the building, and we were clearly underground. A small bunk bed, without pillow or blanket, lay against one wall. In the corner opposite the bed stood a bucket, its mouth covered by a flat piece of wood.

They took off my handcuffs. I stumbled to the cot and threw myself down; I was too exhausted to stand. They didn't try to stop me.

“You sleep good tonight,” said Shimon. “Tomorrow you got a full day.
Lots
of talking to do.”

He stood by the cot, looming over me. The sergeant and the third soldier leaned against the wall opposite. My baby breathed noisily in the sergeant's arms.

“You tell us all kinds of things tomorrow,” Shimon said. “You tell us what the hell you doing in Jordan. Why you crossing the border in the middle of the night. Where you get that ... baby.”

“I told you. I'm an American citizen—”

“Then where your passport?”

We'd had this exchange a dozen times before. “What about
her
?” Shimon said, gesturing toward the baby. “She an American citizen too?”

I didn't answer.

“She an Arab, or a Jew, or what?”

The sergeant groaned and shifted his feet. This didn't seem to be a response to anything we had said, none of which he'd given any sign of understanding.

“Maybe to know what she is,” said Shimon, “we need a—a—scientist.” He groped for the words. “A
space
scientist. Don't you think?”

“No,
no
,” I wailed. “She's just a sick child, is all. Horribly sick, and she needs—”

But the door had already slammed shut.

 

In the morning they were back. Shimon shook me to wake me up. There was no need. I hadn't slept at all.

“This baby,” Shimon said. “She doesn't sleep. Isn't that right?”

“She's sleeping now,” I said, pointing to her.

“She doesn't cry either. Not now, not before. I never saw a baby that doesn't cry.”

“That's true,” I said.

“Have
you
ever heard her cry?”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Tell me something.” He leaned close; I smelled the coffee on his breath. The baby's eyelids trembled but did not open. “In the world she comes from, the babies don't cry?”

 

Outside, the sun had just cleared the horizon. The morning air was fresh and cool and soft. They led me to a small black car without official markings, into which I was invited, not pushed.

“Where are you taking me?” I said.

The sergeant drove. There was something familiar about the way he handled the wheel. I sat next to Shimon in the back seat, my baby against my shoulder. This time they hadn't bothered to handcuff me.

“Coming now to the corner of Yafo and Ben-Yehuda streets,” Shimon announced jovially, like a guide on a tourist bus. “Heart of downtown Jerusalem.
Lots
of falafel stands here. Sell very good falafel. You want we should jump out, buy you a falafel to eat?”

I looked straight ahead. The third soldier, whose name I didn't know, sat in the passenger seat next to the sergeant.

“You hungry?” Shimon asked.

Yes, Shimon. I am hungry and very thirsty. I would give anything right now to have a nice orange soda. Let's jump out of the car, Shimon, you and I, and we'll get falafel and sodas for everyone. And then I'll be lost in a flash, and you won't find us.

“No,” I said. “I'm not hungry.”

“What's she doing?” said Shimon.

At first I didn't realize he was talking about the baby. She stirred inside her blanket. Feebly she pressed her oversize head against me. She'd never done that before.

“She sound ... just like a cat,” said Shimon.

Yes. Like a cat. Yet I had the sense the faint mewing wasn't coming from her throat, but from higher up, somewhere behind her huge black eyes. I didn't understand how that was possible.

“What's she want?” Shimon said uneasily. “What's she need?”

“I don't know,” I said. The mewing was louder now, almost a squeal. In that cry I felt something strange and terrible. I peered into her face and saw no expression, any more than a flute or an oboe or a badly played violin has an expression. The sergeant briefly turned around. His mouth hung open. I knew that man; I'd seen him somewhere. I didn't have time to think where.

“Can't you make her stop that noise?” said Shimon.

It grew louder by the second. I pulled her to my chest and began to stroke her, trying to be gentle. “Shhh, it's all right ...” The third soldier growled something in Hebrew and put his fingers in his ears.

She didn't clutch at me or resist. She felt in my arms like a bag of straw. Yet the wail she gave out was deafening. It was bigger than she was, than all of us, rising from below, splitting its way upward, filling the car and my ears and mind until I felt ready to explode.

“Make her
sto-o-o-op
!” Shimon screamed. I could barely hear him.

“Shhh, shhh, shhh ...” I whispered in her ear.

The sergeant turned to stare. He let go of the steering wheel. A second later came the crash.

I don't know what it was we slammed into. We jerked forward; the doors flew open; there was yelling. The sergeant's voice was the loudest of many. No one noticed when I jumped from the car.

And began to run.

 

She lay in my arms, silent now as the dead. The breath cut into my chest; my swollen foot dragged behind me like an anchor. I ran beneath gray arches, among dingy buildings where the narrow stone-paved alleys twisted into one another and there wasn't any street or sidewalk. Rotting vegetable rinds squashed beneath my feet.

A narrow stairway, between high windowless buildings, led down to an alley. The steps were high and smooth and hard, also slippery where crushed watermelon fragments oozed their juice. I'd just started down when I saw the men gathered at the foot of the steps.

About a dozen men such as I'd never seen before. Not one woman. Pale and bearded; long caftans of greasy, fish belly white, striped with pale blue. They watched me with dead dark eyes, in which I expected hatred but saw only blankness.

From half-opened lips came the hum of their chanting.
Kha. Kha. Kha—

—thou must recite, thou must remember, the commandments of thy God. Thou must gather by the moonlit ashen shores of a dead book and a broken promise, quench endless thirst with waters of thine own rot—

I knew these men. I detested them, and for that hatred I despised myself, knowing I'd betrayed the generations that had borne me, allied myself to evil beyond imagining. My feet trembled. I stood still, not descending, not retreating.

The baby shuddered against my chest.

She began to make soft mewing sounds, the beginnings of that sirenlike howl I couldn't bear to hear again. I turned. I climbed back up the steps, careful not to slip on the watermelon. When I looked behind me, the men had vanished.

 

I drifted, strengthless, among the alleys. No benches; no stoops. No place to sit and rest. When I heard heavy boots running behind me, I didn't even try to get away.

The sergeant's powerful body thudded against mine, almost knocking me over. It swept me like wind at the seashore. His arm held firm around my shoulders, and once more I ran, as part of
his
running, and now I wasn't tired. Nor did my foot weigh me down. Swiftly we ran, faster than I'd have thought possible, and didn't stop until we'd reached a trafficked street.