Martyrs’ Crossing (13 page)

Doron supposed some response was necessary.

“I'm glad they like me,” he said. He looked down at their linked hands. “Are we going to hold hands all the way to your office, sir?”

“Oh, sorry,” Yizhar said, with a half-laugh, almost throwing Doron's hand away. God, was the boy going to be difficult?

The five men negotiated their way into a narrow elevator. As they rode up, the air was close and warm. Doron felt like a prisoner. He wondered what would happen if suddenly he could make Reuven's uniform melt away. Fssst! He used his laser gun on Reuven's shirt. No more sleeves, no more epaulets, no more braid! Hanging, swinging underarms, double-chinned elbows. Wrists rolled with fat. Another pull of the trigger: Fssst! Buttons pop off, shirt disintegrates. Big hairy breasts rise and fall. Fssst! Belt unbuckles. Pants, shorts drop away. Doron stopped himself. The thing was too dreadful to contemplate. He watched as Reuven clenched and unclenched his hands. He wondered what Reuven was thinking about, if you could use that word in that context. He wondered if Reuven was a good man to have as an assistant, and what he did to assist. When the door opened, the men hustled Doron down the hallway to Yizhar's office.

The hallway was buzzing with the officers who worked on this floor of The Building, popping in and out of offices, smoking, hitching up their pants, zipping their flies as they emerged from the men's room. Except for Yizhar, they seemed to be potbellied, with belts slung beneath their stomachs, and the buttons of their khaki shirts pulling against their ample pectorals. They hired secretaries they thought were sexy, but the secretaries were always too dumpy, too middle-aged. Doron looked at Yizhar's secretary as they passed through her reception area. She was filing something. Reuven stopped in front of her and put out his hand. The men did not speak with her as she handed three or four files to Reuven. Ah, she was typical, Doron thought. Her hair was a deep red and her midriff regrettably exposed—though, left to the imagination, it would improve only slightly. She was the kind of woman you didn't want to imagine naked. She and the rest of them in The Building—all now spending their precious non-coffee-break moments going over his dossier looking for sexual perversion or drug abuse or instances of juvenile delinquency—
they
were the people who killed that boy, Doron told himself. It was their fault, with their long purple nails. Putting Doron on hold, forcing him to call down to fucking Tel Aviv, making him listen while that computer-generated mouse music played ragtime, and Marina Raad sat there watching him with her iron eyes, her rain-soaked hair hanging down over Ibrahim like a mermaid's. Doron had been afraid to return her regard. He was ineffectual, she could see that, and the situation was desperate, he could see that. He remembered the end-of-the-world sound of each rasping breath the boy could not quite take.

Yizhar sat Doron down on a straight-backed metal chair in front of his desk. He smiled at Doron; he was always smiling but he didn't seem sunny. He looked like a green-eyed owl, beaky, clever, probably ruthless. He was perched on the side of his desk, waiting. Doron waited, too. He had plenty of time; he had been taken off Shuhada checkpoint, and was waiting for a new assignment. It had been four days since what had happened happened. He had nowhere to go, except back to the Islamic Museum's library. Yizhar looked at Doron, sitting there. Doron seemed quite calm and relaxed. Yizhar asked everyone but Reuven to leave the room. Doron looked at Yizhar and tried to imagine what it must be like to be such a stereotype of what you are, such a self-parody. Well, to Yizhar, he himself probably looked like some kind of a parody, too, a dumb young fuck-up soldier sitting there, looking a little too relaxed, given his situation. That's probably how he looked to Yizhar, though it was far from how he felt. Zvili would be relaxed in this situation, because he had no conscience. He wondered if Yizhar intended to interview Zvili. Or if he already had. Zvili, who'd had the nerve to brush his metal detector over the mother's body while her baby was gasping.

“Ari? This is Sergeant Reuven, my assistant,” Yizhar said, with a sweep of his hand. Over in the corner with the plants and the file cabinet, Reuven looked up. He nodded slowly at Doron, who saluted from his chair.

Yizhar surveyed the room. Doron thought: He's surveying the room. Yizhar looked at the door. Now he's going to lock the door, Doron thought. Yizhar slid off his desk and went to lock his office door. He leaned out into the reception area first, and said “No calls” to his secretary. Lord help me, thought Doron. Yizhar returned to his perch.

“You could be in deep-shit trouble, kid, do you know that?” Yizhar asked.

“I'm aware there's a problem, yes, sir.”

“You know who that child was, the other day?”

“Yes, sir, I am aware of the baby's family, if that's what you mean. I know who they are. When they came into the guardroom, I didn't know.”

Yizhar picked up a glass cup filled with coffee. It had been sitting on his desk when they arrived: old milk had settled on the top and was beginning to crust. With both hands, Yizhar held the cup up in front of his face and looked at its contents with a practiced, scientific eye. He shrugged once, and sipped at it. He swallowed. He nodded to himself, and put the cup back down, a little farther away from him than it had been.

“It was because of who he was that the baby was delayed. They knew at headquarters,” Doron said.

“What?” Yizhar said.

“They
knew,
” Doron said. “Someone told me expressly that I was not to allow the Hajimis to enter.”

“Someone? Please. Who?” Yizhar sniffed.

“A guy I talked to on the phone at headquarters,” Doron said.

“At that hour it may have been the janitor for all you know. Could have been the Defense Minister's driver. What was this person's name?” Yizhar gingerly fingered a tiny tape machine.

“I didn't ask,” said Doron. He felt like a fool. “I wrote down the number somewhere.” He fumbled at his pockets—of course he didn't have it now; no jacket. He must have left it at his mother's.

Yizhar ignored the fumbling as if it were just simply too pathetic a ruse. He fiddled with his tape machine.

“Neat little item, isn't it?” Yizhar said to Doron, looking over at him as he set the thing down at the edge of his desk. Doron noticed that the desk on which the impossibly small, impossibly thin, brilliantly black recorder sat was rusting. Rusting. God, the army and its priorities.

“Right, Ari. We'll look into that call, okay? If you find the number, great,” he said. “Let us know.”

Doron thought he detected a hint of sarcasm in Yizhar's voice.

“Right now,” Yizhar went on, “I'd like to sit here and tell you just what happened from the time you first became aware that Marina Hajimi and her son were trying to cross into Israel until the ambulance arrived.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Yes?” Yizhar said.

“You're going to tell
me?
” said Doron. “I thought this was an investigation.”

“Yes, yes,” Yizhar said. “Let me explain. For the next few weeks, until this dies down? I am you and you are me. I mean, right now, you are the Israeli army, and obviously so am I, and I'm just going to take over for you here for a while, so you can relax and calm down, and let me do the heavy steering. Got it?”

“But you want to hear what
happened,
don't you?”

“Look, if you tell me what happened, it's only going to be what you
believe
happened, am I right? No one knows everything. You don't. The kid's mother doesn't. The other men don't. I don't want to get turned around here, with too many versions. I've heard a couple of witnesses, and that's enough. They told me what I need to know, and now, I'm just going to put everything together. And that will be it.”

“Huh,” said Doron. He looked at Yizhar with a new respect, and fear.

“Yes.” Yizhar smiled. “It's easy. I've done it before. In the end, it will be our word against theirs, or against hers. It's not like it's going to end up in a court of law. It's p.r., not justice.”

“But there were other Palestinians there.”

“As I said, our word against theirs. Sheukhi, you must mean.”

“Sheukhi? I don't know. Some guy in a tie who was butting in and trying to help her. In his way.”

“Yeah. That would be Sheukhi. The lawyer. Lawyer who talks a lot.”

“A lawyer?” said Doron. “Oh, no.”

Yizhar got up off his desk and went around behind it to his chair. He sat down, and looked fondly at his tape recorder.

“Don't worry,” said Yizhar. “Sheukhi may be a lawyer, but he's a Palestinian lawyer. We've checked him out already. Not a great reputation, even among Palestinians. Not worth worrying about, for us. The testimony of an Israeli garbageman would carry more weight.”

Doron looked down at the floor.

“So tell me what happened,” Doron said softly, addressing the linoleum.

“I was recovering from the earlier unrest at the checkpoint,” Yizhar said. “There was a storm. A woman and her child sought entry into the trailer. I could see the child was ill, so I took them in out of the rain. The boy did not look as if he was in need of attention when I first saw them. The woman gave me the boy's medical documents, which I examined and found in order. In normal circumstances, I would have passed them through right away. But given the closure, I decided to run her through the computer. I discovered her husband was in jail, and so I took the name and ran it past a few of my superiors. I called, they checked her out, I explained the child's predicament, and some fifteen minutes after she arrived at the trailer, an ambulance was on its way to pick them up. Unfortunately, it arrived a few moments too late.” He looked over at Doron, who was still looking down.

“What do you think?” Yizhar asked with a note of pride, but with some gentleness, too. “Good, no? Not inaccurate.”

“I don't know what to say,” Doron said. “She was there too, you know. She knows how long it took. She knows that the ambulance was actually ordered for one of my men, she knows what calls got made, what the answers were.”

“She is the wife of a jailed terrorist, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah.”

“So. What do you think of our story?”

“I don't know what to say.”

“Say: ‘Very good, sir.' ”

“But I . . .”

“Say it, Lieutenant. I know you can. You're a smart boy.”

“The boy
died,
sir.”

“I know that,” Yizhar said, suddenly not flippant.

“She lost her baby.”

“Yes, she did. And now he's gone,” Yizhar said. Am I going to have to spell out everything? he wondered. “And there's nothing we can do about that. Too bad, we would all like to bring him back. But we're dealing with what's possible here. We want to save what we can out of the wreckage. Pull out the survivors. You want to be one of the survivors, don't you? The Israeli army is one of the survivors. We are not all going to go down with that—baby, as you call him. He
was
two and a half, by the way.”

“Right,” said Doron.

“Not a baby, is all I'm saying.”

Doron finally looked up from the floor at Yizhar, who was watching with fascination as Reuven groomed himself. The big man gently inserted the tip of a paper clip beneath a nail, pulled it from one end to the other, then lifted it and flicked its burden across the room in the general direction of a stack of
Jane's Defence Weekly
magazines that was sitting in the corner in the shadows of Yizhar's coatrack.

“It's a crucial distinction.” Yizhar put out his arms over the back of his chair. “Babies—babies are innocent. Can't talk. Big-eyed nobodies. Little boys are sweet, too, but they are real people. Identifiably somebody. Have personalities. Will obviously become members of their families, resemble their families already. If you see what I mean. The boy looked just like his grandfather, for example. I don't want to be cynical, but in people's minds, little boys can be future explosives experts, future jailed terrorists, future suicide bombers. Babies, it's harder to imagine. But I'm sure that somewhere out there is a photograph of little Hassan Hajimi, Hamas deputy for political information or whatever the fuck, in short pants, sitting on
his
grandfather's lap or holding
his
mother's hand.”

Yizhar sat forward.

“Maybe we should find that picture,” he said, turning to Reuven. “It must exist. Get it out to the media. Just to make a psychological point.”

Reuven grunted, nodded. Wrote something down in a small notebook that he eased out of his back pocket.

Yizhar took up a pen from his desk and began playing with it, flicking the tip in and out, clicking it, opening it, squeezing its spring, putting it back together, reclosing it. He picked up a notepad and applied the pen to it, then thought better of the impulse, and put the paper back down again. He looked up at Doron and smiled. Doron assumed Yizhar must like that small smile, must think it looked good on him. There was a long silence. No clicking. Reuven stopped picking at his cuticles. Yizhar stopped smiling.

“What do you make of the mother?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Doron asked.

“I mean, how do you assess her character: Is she strong, determined, intelligent? Or maybe she is meek, defenseless, shy? What do you think she's like?”

“Well, remembering that the time I spent with her was maybe an hour and that her son was dying on her lap, I guess I'd say she is very tough, strong-willed. Angry. Vengeful now, probably.”

“All Arabs are vengeful,” Yizhar said. He was throwing it out, to see how the boy would react.

“Oh,” said Doron.