Leon Uris (63 page)

‘Hello, Frau Dorfmann speaking.’

‘Emma, this is Ibrahim.’

‘Oh, I am excited to hear from you. You are fine?’

Ibrahim allowed the longest sigh of his life to whisper out of him. ‘I would like to come over.’

‘My goodness, Ibrahim, why you didn’t call me earlier? Because you were here last night, I surely did not expect you to call again so soon. I am afraid my mother and sister have come all the way from Sellenbüren. You will come tomorrow?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Ibrahim, you are all right?’

‘I am fine.’

‘I am so sorry, Ibrahim.’

He squeezed his eyes together, clenched his teeth, and almost let out a tear. ‘I am very lonely,’ he said, not able to stop himself. ‘I need you.’

She had never heard such words from him, for he had never spoken them to her, or anyone else. ‘Ibrahim, give me an hour to send them off, then please, hurry over.’

‘Thank you, Emma.’

Ibrahim allowed himself to be cuddled, and this made Emma feel very happy. He just pressed next to her and sighed repeatedly, and she soothed him without questions. At last he fell into a deep snoring sleep, but this was broken by the ring of the telephone.

‘It is for you,’ Emma said.

‘Forgive me for not meeting you today and forgive the hour. Have you seen tonight’s newspapers or heard the radio?’ Charles Maan asked.

‘No.’

‘Taji has defected.’

Ibrahim flung the covers back and sat up fuzzy-brained.

‘Where is that motherwhore?’

‘He’s already out of the country. He showed up with Fawzi Kabir and Prince Rahman at the airport. He told the press that he had accepted an appointment as the adviser to the Saudi royal family on refugee affairs. He’s leaving behind his tribe, his family, everyone. He mentions you and me as having brought a corrupt influence to the conference, and so forth. He flew off on Rahman’s private plane.’

‘What does this mean to us, Charles?’

‘It means you had better start thinking about yourself.’

‘I’m staying,’ Ibrahim cried. ‘I’m staying until they throw me out or kill me!

T
HE
H
AJ ROARED. FOR
a month that followed Ahmed Taji’s defection he pounded his fist on any and all committee room tables. He demanded answers to embarrassing questions. He spoke to sympathetic reporters and questioned the honesty of numerous delegates. He gave a lecture at the university to an overflow crowd of students and teachers, denouncing the Arab delegations’ deliberate torpedoing of the conference, and he used the forbidden word ‘Israel.’ He went before the International Arbitration Commission alone and demanded permission to negotiate directly for the return of the first hundred thousand and the unfreezing of their assets.

As Ibrahim launched his one-man crusade, the Arab delegations united in a furious counterassault by questioning not only the man’s politics but his character as well. Was Ibrahim on the Zionist payroll? Did Ibrahim indulge in weird sexual practices? Was Ibrahim mentally sound?

It became colder and colder in Zurich’s autumn.

The rain pelted a slanting garret skylight. Ibrahim rose from his prayer rug on the floor, glowered down on the glistening empty street below, then stretched out on his back on the bed and grunted. A knock.

‘Yes, enter.’

Charles Maan came in and emptied the contents of a paper bag on the little square table. The usual pauper’s fare emerged of salami, bread, cheese, a few sweet cakes, some cheap wine. ‘Look, two oranges. Jaffa oranges, no less.’

‘Then we are rich,’ Ibrahim said, sitting up.

They peeled and ate. Ibrahim noticed that Charles was in one of his somber moods, for his face sagged more than usual.

‘Well, Charles?’

‘Is it so obvious?’ Maan asked.

‘You would make a very bad camel trader.’

‘Monsignor Grenelli returned from Rome last night.’

Ibrahim covered that swift gush of fear which swept through him. He fiddled with the cork on the wine bottle, told himself to gain control.

‘He brought good news?’ Ibrahim asked.

Charles Maan nodded. ‘I’ve been asked to come to the Vatican by invitation of the Pope.’

‘The Pope. Whew! That is impressive. And you know what the Pope wants?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, tell me, Charles.’

‘I am to make a plan for the removal, relocation, and rehabilitation of all Christian Arabs in the camps.’

‘But that is magnificent!’ Ibrahim said, quickly involving himself in removing the cork from the wine bottle. It popped. He poured and managed to cover up the trembling in his hand. ‘That will be good for me as well. I can hold this up before the International Arbitration Commission and demand the same from Egypt and Syria. You see, all they have done is vaguely promise to relocate our people. This will force them to agree before the International Arbitration Commission. Like a treaty.’

‘Come on, Ibrahim,’ Charles retorted. ‘You know any treaty will only last as long as it is convenient. No Arab nation truly considers itself bound by a treaty.’

‘But it is a weapon. It forces them into the open for the first time,’ Ibrahim replied.

Charles reached out and took Ibrahim’s hand and lowered his wineglass. ‘The Pope has attached a condition. He will not get involved if it means an open fight with the Arab world. Everything must be done under the table.’

‘That’s the fucking Vatican for you! Everything a secret!’

Charles offered him a cigarette, which he refused. ‘Isn’t it enough that they are humanitarian enough to get involved? You know damned well that no Pope can openly defy Islam. What do you want, Haj, another hundred years of warfare like the Crusades?’

‘Of course not. It makes perfect sense,’ Ibrahim said, calming down. ‘Are the Jews involved in this deal?’

‘They quietly agree to unfreeze some assets.’

‘Are they letting any Christians back into Israel?’

‘Not without recognition or a formal treaty.’

‘I see,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Which of the Arab countries have agreed to take the Christians?’

‘None,’ Charles Maan answered.

‘Then how can it work?’

‘We will look elsewhere around the world. That will be part of my job, to find a place to move them. America will always take some. I know that, in Central America, Honduras needs shopkeepers. Who knows? I don’t know. Thirty, forty thousand ... we will find them homes.’

‘You will begin your work when the conference is over?’

‘The conference is over, Haj. In truth, it never began. It was never anything more than an exercise, a game.’

‘When are you leaving, Charles?’

‘When you give your blessing.’

‘That is all you really ever came here for, to get the Christians out! So leave!’

‘Ibrahim, I want your blessing.’

‘Take my blessing and choke on it!’

‘Ibrahim, I want your blessing.’

The Haj slumped into the creaky little wooden chair and wrung his hands, then, tremblingly, sipped at the wineglass and asked for a cigarette. ‘In my lifetime I have buried two sons and also two daughters. Jamil now sits in a Jordanian prison and there is a chance he will die for what I have done. Yet I have not wept. Of course I am happy for you, Charles.’

‘Ibrahim, I strongly suggest you make your own plans to leave. There is no longer a purpose for you to remain in Zurich.’

‘I will stay. I will not give up. Someone will listen to me, sometime.’

‘It’s over, go back.’

‘To what! To Aqbat Jabar?’

‘To Israel,’ Charles Maan said.

‘I have thought of that many nights, Charles. I have prayed for the strength to do so. Yet it is not possible, somehow. It is every day for the rest of my life I worry about. Haj Ibrahim, the traitor.’

‘Traitor to what?’

‘Myself.’

‘Your Arab brothers have imprisoned you for life. Those camps will be turned into madhouses. Ibrahim, you know and I know that the Jews are easier to deal with and eminently more fair, but if you are waiting for them to disappear from the region because we insult them or try to humiliate them, then you are mistaken. The trees will grow tall in Israel, but they will never grow in Aqbat Jabar.’

‘Charles, you asked for my blessing,’ Ibrahim said unevenly. ‘You have it. I am honest about this. I give you leave to go. You have been more than a brother. Now please leave. Do not stay and look upon me weeping.’

‘You have refused to see Gideon Asch,’ Maan pressed. ‘I beg you to think about it. Here is the name of a Swiss factory owner. He is only twenty minutes by train from Zurich. He is a Jew but an honorable man. He has arranged most of the clandestine meetings between Asch and the various Arab delegations.’ Charles scribbled out a name and phone number and placed it carefully under the wine bottle. He patted Ibrahim’s back and left.

The Haj put his face in his hands and wept.

G
OETHE ATE HERE AT
the Golden Head. One might say that that was the beginning and the end of Bülach’s history. The major crime of the past several months had been when someone was caught tossing a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. Bülach, so insignificant it rarely made the Swiss guidebooks, had a second distinction. It was between Zurich and the airport and acted as a landmark for incoming aircraft.

Ibrahim had whizzed on precision Swiss rails through twenty minutes of immaculate rolling countryside to the Bülach Bahnhof. He detrained, looked about, and was recognized immediately.

‘Haj Ibrahim.’

‘Yes.’

‘Heir Schlosberg,’ his contact said, offering a hand while guiding Ibrahim into a waiting automobile. Schlosberg, one of Bülach’s two Jews, owned a small but exquisite factory for cutting and polishing those perfect little jewels that went into Swiss watches.

He drove through the flawlessly preserved Old Town, a six-by-six-block circular configuration that had once been encompassed by the wall required to preserve the feudal order that was honed over the centuries into an immaculate Swiss sense of neutrality.

‘Goethe ate here,’ Schlosberg said as they passed the Golden Head Hotel and Restaurant. Ibrahim nodded. Schlosberg pulled up before his modestly affluent home in a wooded area called the Brüder Knoll and led Ibrahim to the library and closed the door behind him.

Gideon Asch sat behind Schlosberg’s desk. ‘You rotten son of a bitch,’ he said angrily. ‘Why haven’t you contacted me before this?’ He shot out of the chair, turned his back, and glared out to the rolling vista.

Ibrahim came up behind him and they stared together. At last they turned toward each other and embraced hard and wordlessly. Out came the whiskey.

‘Only a drop,’ Ibrahim admonished.

‘What the hell were you thinking of?’ Gideon asked. ‘Three months ago I might have been able to work some kind of deal, a trade-off, something. Anyhow, you’re really fucked now.’

‘So is Israel,’ Ibrahim retorted.

‘I’d rather be in Tel Aviv than Aqbat Jabar.’

‘I would too, if I were a Jew.’

Gideon’s age showed suddenly as he emptied his glass and drew another drink from the bottle.

‘We were fools, of course,’ Ibrahim said, ‘but we had a great deal of hope when we arrived in Zurich. After all, we were not in Amman but in a true Western nation, a democracy. Here, with the eyes of the world staring at us, surely our delegations would act in a civilized and rational manner. Surely sympathy for my people would emerge from the press. I was a naïve child. Who cares? Well, maybe the Jews care. You know what we say. The Jews are liberal. Take advantage of them.’

‘They also believe they can humiliate us out of existence,’ Gideon said. ‘It won’t happen. We’ve been humiliated before by perverse societies.’

Ibrahim blanched for a moment at the remark. What was the use of fighting with Gideon? ‘If I had come to you in the beginning the result would have been the same as it is now. Humanity was the last thing on the minds of the Syrians and Egyptians. Perpetuation of hatred was the first thing, and in that they have succeeded.’

‘Yes, they have,’ Gideon agreed. ‘They will continue this charade until the dead horse has been flogged a thousand times over. And then another conference, and another and another. Then a war, and another. And, my brother, you’ll still be in Aqbat Jabar.’

‘What is there left for us to do, Gideon?’

‘Rebel. However, no revolution has ever come from the Arab people, only coups, holy wars, and assassinations. Why, in the name of God, is it that you can only exist under a military boot and fanatical holy men?’

Ibrahim downed his whiskey hard, ignoring Gideon’s anger, flushed and coughed and asked for another. ‘Have you heard any word of my son Ishmael?’ he asked at last.

‘No. It is just about impossible for Nuri Mudhil to contact me in Switzerland. Too many messengers can spoil the message and they could also put Mudhil in danger.’

‘I understand.’

‘I should think that Ishmael is safe. I’m afraid I can’t say the same for Jamil. I do have contact with Colonel Zyyad. He’s spoiling to settle his score with you.’

‘I do not fear Zyyad. I can handle him.’

‘Sure, as long as you had stature and importance the Jordanians weren’t going to play around with you, but don’t underestimate Farid Zyyad’s brutality. He can show a civilized face to the outside world, British training and all that, but don’t go to him expecting mercy. You won’t be the strong leader you were when you left. That’s what he is waiting for. I fear for Jamil.’

‘I knew that when I left Palestine,’ Ibrahim said.

‘I still have a few things the Jordanians want from me,’ Gideon said. ‘Let me try to make a deal for you and your family. I’ll think of something.’

‘I will not dishonor my son’s courage.’

‘Courage for what, Ibrahim? To grow up to be a terrorist? Suppose it were Ishmael in that prison? Would you make a deal for him?’

‘I would let Ishmael die first,’ Ibrahim answered without hesitation.

Gideon’s face suddenly reddened with anger. His fist pounded on the desk; he was unable to speak.

‘I did not come to argue with you, Gideon. It has always been you who has said that the Arab lives in fantasy. Well, are you not living out the greatest fantasy of them all? Do you believe you will overcome the entire Arab world?’