Martyrs’ Crossing (11 page)

There was too much history here for Yizhar to worry too desperately about the outcome of a single moment in the rapid flow. What did an hour matter? He would just do his bit and save himself and let history rush onward. History would rush onward, regardless of him and Doron and the dead boy, he knew. The Zen of working for the Israeli Defense Forces, he thought to himself.

It was too bad for Doron that the baby had turned out to be a virtual Arab dignitary. Yizhar himself had personally never heard of George Raad before, although Hajimi's name was of course familiar to him. Hamas bigwig—great. It was seriously and really too bad the kid had to be Hajimi's son. Son of a political prisoner, Yizhar had read in the
International Herald Tribune.
Right, he thought. Translation from the bullshit: Son of a jailed terrorist. And even more too bad that the child had to be the grandson of some wild-eyed Pal intellectual type. A doctor—why were they always doctors? But this guy was not some local dentist who had organized terror cells or some oddball gynecologist who happened to be the Chairman's closest confidant. The Raad guy was known throughout the world, it seemed, he was highly respectable, apparently, a brilliant writer, and famous as a doctor, too, even if he, Yizhar, who thought of himself as not entirely brainless, had never heard of him and neither had anyone he knew. Israelis never knew shit about Palestinians, Yizhar always said. Anyway, suddenly this Raad was practically a Nobel prize–winner, now that his grandson turned out to be the kid who died. That was fate and the onward rush. A phone ringing in the middle of the night.

So now a little boy who would have just been some Palestinian toddler who had the misfortune to have an asthma attack at the wrong political moment turns out to be an international cause célèbre. Died at Shuhada crossing, where else?
Shuhada
meant “martyr” in Arabic, and Yizhar had noticed over the years that any Palestinian who ever died anywhere was immediately transformed by the Authority or by whoever was speaking for the Palestinians into some kind of glorified god, an Allah-inspired victim of the evil Israelis.

Yizhar imagined a small boy in a head scarf and white robes, with a golden sword strapped to his side, and gold medals hanging from his neck, and gold braid around his waist, like a Palestinian warrior from the days before statehood. A cause célèbre and a major big problem for the Israeli Defense Forces, and Yizhar will have to stay up late for this night and many other nights, to say nothing of having to hear ad nauseam and to the nth degree the pathetic and lame and possibly whining excuses of this Doron fellow and his other nameless buddies at the checkpoint.

Yizhar didn't want to hear it. What was the point? He already knew exactly what had happened. We'd just get it out our way, and then never let the media know who the guys at the checkpoint were, don't give them any idea who was responsible. The mere possibility of being on television could make a man start spouting information, either because he was scared or because he was excited. Yizhar feared the Israeli press, who knew everyone and everything and who were always faxing the international media top secret documents from the army hours before the head of central command had seen them. After the Israelis, he feared the English, who read the Hebrew media—or got someone to translate it for them—and then extrapolated and embroidered till you had a story there in front of you that at least seemed to make sense, even if it was a tissue of vividly constructed lies. And he feared the wide-eyed international human-rights people. The foreign, hunger-striking, nose-sticking, meddling, prattling, babbling, sermonizing, peace-loving, underdoggy folks. Lord, they were a dangerous crew. Sometimes when he listened to them he wondered if they could possibly mean what they were saying. They lived in some other world where things were very very safe and very very certain.

He unlocked the door of The Building with his card and took the elevator up. Inside the steel and plastic box, it smelled of cigarette smoke, and, more subtly, of piss. A couple of late-season mosquitoes zinged around the light, trapped here forever. He would have to call Avram Shell. Shell worked at
Ha'aretz,
and he was smart, even though he was a journalist. The elevator gave an occasional lazy ding as it passed some of the floors. This was a country in need of repairs. Don't forget, Yizhar often told his colleagues, this is the Third World. He stepped out of the elevator to the sound of a vacuum cleaner rumbling around the hallways.

He called Shell. Avram was always busy. Yizhar imagined him in his tiny cubicle with his white shirt, his one nod to respectability, all crumpled and untucked, and actual ink stains on his fingers, as if it weren't already clear enough what his job was from his stoop and his squint and the way he hunched over a phone.

“So what about it?” Shell asked, without responding to Yizhar's hello. “This baby. Give it to me, Danny.”

“On deepest background,” Yizhar began. He took a forkful of his noodles.

“Please,” Shell said. “I know, I know.”

“On deepest background, this baby, first of all, was not a baby.”

“Baby not a baby,” said Shell. “Okay, I got that. Thanks. Bye.” He waited for Yizhar to go on.

“He was two and a half years old,” said Yizhar, “so let's not go imagining a swaddling babe in his little blue blankie. He was a toddler.”

“Right. Point taken. Next?”

“Next: He was not showing visible signs of distress when he arrived at the checkpoint. Period. No distress.”

“I heard different.”

“Yes, but this you're hearing from
me.
The soldiers at Ramallah had no idea it was an emergency. Between you and me, they thought the mother was hysterical, but don't print that.”

“You're concerned for the family's grief, et cetera? Very moving, Daniel,” Shell said. There was just a hint of a laugh in his voice. “What are you eating there?”

“Noodles.” Yizhar took another bite. The vacuum cleaner was passing before his door. He heard it grow louder, then recede.

“From the Thais?”

“Yeah,” Yizhar said. Oh, it was a tight and nasty little world they lived in. They all worked in the same three-block area, all ate at the same places, knew the same people and stories.

“How many guys you talked to?” Shell asked.

“A bunch.”

“Commanding officer?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

“When?”

“Soon, Avram.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Look, the boys simply put her through the document check that we're doing under this closure, and yes, it is a rigorous check, much tighter than usual, we acknowledge that. We're proud of that. We think it's necessary, we think . . .”

“Yah, yah, yah, got you, okay.”

“No, really, I want to say we think the new security regs are justified by the recent wave of bombings. I mean, has everyone forgotten? In case they've forgotten, you might want to remind them about the bus bombs and also about the major riot these guys had to deal with at that very checkpoint, just preceding the incident.”

“There were injuries to the men, right?”

“Of course, as usual. And the men did a damned good job, acquitted themselves in a very responsible way, with no serious injuries among the Palestinians.”

Avram was taking it all down.

“So understandably,” Yizhar went on, “the soldiers were being extra careful—maybe a little too careful, that can happen. How careful do you need to be with the wife of a jailed Hamas terrorist, by the way?”

“Right. Hajimi. He's Hamas?”

“We both have his file, Avram,” said Yizhar.

In any case, Yizhar told Shell, the woman was given clearance after only a fifteen-minute wait, which is not long even in proven cases of medical emergency, and only after she was cleared through did the child begin to show signs of medical distress. An ambulance was already there at the checkpoint when the child went into cardiac arrest. The soldiers had gone by the book, their behavior had been correct in every way, and it's just simply too bad the child died, and everyone feels terrible about it, especially the young men who were on duty that night. Questions?

Avram was taking it, going with it, even if he didn't entirely believe it. That was the beauty of the relationship. Both Yizhar and Shell knew what was important: security. They were patriots; they didn't even have to think about it. Of course, Yizhar had other concerns, but he didn't need to explain all that to Avram. Those concerns didn't change his behavior, or his story. He did not mention the officer at headquarters in Tel Aviv who—Zvili had said when he was questioned—had forbidden Doron to let the woman through. Doron was the source for that bit of Zvili's information, and it was impossible that Doron could identify the man who had been on the other end of the line. To anyone without firsthand knowledge of the call, it would sound like something Doron had invented to protect himself. Yizhar was counting on that, not that anyone would ever even hear about that call. Yizhar also happened to know that after-hours calls to certain safe numbers in Tel Aviv were bounced to a secure number in The Building in Jerusalem after three rings. Only top officers—the officers likely to receive such calls, the diligent ones, who worked late—knew that. No one else, not even Avram Shell. As he listened to the toggle and tap of Avram's keyboard, Yizhar could feel tomorrow's story taking shape. Good. Step one.

Yizhar felt no remorse. His version of the story was not a lie! It was true! For the most part. It was certainly true to the testimony he'd extracted from Zvili. Of course, even an old war-toughened type like himself felt bad about a baby's death, any old goddamned kid. It was sad and too bad. And finished. And now, this. This is how we do things and this is how we get things done and this is how we get through situations. Simple, simple. There was only the question of handling Doron, and what Doron would have to say about things and how he would feel about the story. And a slight, nagging worry about little Zvili—Yizhar had told him to keep quiet. Would he turn out to be a blabbermouth?

Would Doron? Yizhar doubted it, and that was good, because he didn't want Doron to say much, not even to Yizhar. He wanted to feel the boy out, see what his story was overall, and find out how much he knew about the details: who was the baby, his family, had Doron himself ever heard of Hajimi? Did he understand the national implications, and the implications for the army? And how about that supposed phone call and the man who answered it? Otherwise, Yizhar had already heard all he needed. The other checkpoint soldiers whom Yizhar had interviewed were comfortable with the army's version of events, but except for Zvili, they had not been directly involved in the incident with the kid.

Yizhar knew the persuasive powers of Colonel Daniel Yizhar, and he had no doubt that Ari Doron, whatever his background, whatever his psychological profile, whatever his ideas about politics and Palestinians, whatever he remembered from that night, would eventually go along with Yizhar when he was shown what the situation was exactly. When he began to understand who Hajimi was exactly, and Raad. When he began to comprehend the implications and repercussions, because this was about repercussions, not about the incident. You had to identify the people to whom something had happened, and then you had to decide: Who was the victim, really? And who was the perpetrator? What was at stake, and what was the value of the factual narrative of events? Who would profit from it? This was about the truth, not the facts.

D
ORON PUSHED BACK HIS CHAIR
in the reading room, and closed his eyes. He could hear a dusty thud each time the librarian piled another book up on the stack at her station. He tried a relaxation technique one of his girlfriends had taught him: imagine empty spaces, she said. Not easy to do with the geography they grew up in, but Doron made an effort. The Kinneret. He pictured its shores on a Sunday afternoon, no one around: grass, dirt and sand, litter—broken bottles and flattened Styrofoam cups, cigarette stubs; but then the sea, flat, gray, shallow, and on the other side, distant but there, the flowering hills rising up and away. He imagined swimming in it. Stroke after stroke. The breathing. Did it calm him? You weren't supposed to ask yourself that question: it interrupted the concentration, intensified the stress. Did it calm him?

He opened his eyes again: this place was empty, too, and musty. One scholar sat at a far table, bent over a decaying monograph. Doron had never been to the Islamic library before; he hadn't even known that this odd artifact of Muslim culture existed in his part of Jerusalem. The reading room was an upstairs afterthought in a museum that seemed to be dedicated to numbing exhibits of Islamic calligraphy or Arab copperware. Thick, sparkling dust floated in great rays of sunlight that swept down from the high windows. It was cold up here, as if the heat hadn't been turned on all winter. The librarian was watching him—she was a helpful, middle-aged lady, and she wore glasses, just like a good librarian. She let him use the Xerox machine for free, because he was a soldier.