Martyrs’ Crossing (17 page)

There was another pause in the conversation. They both felt it. This was the moment when they would naturally have turned to Ibrahim and let his presence undo the silence between them. But now they were both busy not talking about Ibrahim. Marina stood and turned off the kitchen light. She went to the window, and pushed out the metal shutters that she used for blocking the early morning sun, which got in her eyes in winter in that kitchen no matter where she sat. She looked at her father.

It was odd to have him here. She had finally admitted to herself that he was the reason she had decided to study at Bir Zeit, decided to get to know the Homeland. George sipped his coffee and looked at the headlines in
Al-Quds,
which was lying on the breakfast table. Her mother had been resigned and stubbornly unromantic about Palestine, but her father was quite the opposite. Marina had ended up in Ramallah, she thought, because of all her father had taught her. Her father would call her into his study in the evening, when she imagined he was reading medical treatises, and show her the key, the old key to the Raad family house in Jerusalem, the house he was now so reluctant to visit, and tell her stories from her great-grandfather's day, about men on horseback with swords held aloft, and about the wounds of the fabled fighter Ibrahim Abu Dayyeh, who fled in his pajamas from the hospital in order to continue his defense of the neighborhoods of Jerusalem in 1948 up until the last minute.

“What do you say, shall we flee tomorrow?” That was what George told her were her grandfather's sarcastic words every evening before the family went to bed.

It was a way of thinking about the world: in her father's heart, the Raads were refugees, exiles, and outsiders, no matter how American Marina might have felt growing up, with her mood rings and her prowess at Monopoly and her comfortable way of life. At the house in Cambridge, news items from the Middle East were like letters from family in the old country, discussed and dissected at the breakfast table and then at the dinner table—every day, all day. The Chairman and Uncle Ahmed had been her adolescent heroes, and she'd made The Cause, as her father would say, her whole life, in a way. She studied Palestinian history at Harvard; she had her master's degree in Middle Eastern political science when she arrived at Bir Zeit. (Of course, her father never took her master's seriously;
he
was the one who had
lived
through the Catastrophe. He was the one who was
born
in Palestine, and of course he was also the world's acknowledged authority on the subject.) Marrying Hassan was a way of gaining authenticity, she realized a long time after she fell in love with him—and having Ibrahim, too, who was a Palestinian born in Palestine.

“The editors of
Al-Quds
seem to think they'll find this soldier,” George said. He folded the paper and looked over at her.

“And they are all-knowing,” she said. Each time she thought about the soldier, she saw his scared face, heard the panic in his voice as things got worse.

“Will you need to see a doctor while you're here?” Marina asked George.

He noticed that she had changed the subject.

“It depends how long I stay,” he said.

“You mean you want to know how long you are invited for?” she asked, managing to smile. She didn't want him to leave, she realized. The house was already too empty.

“I can really only stay a week, I think,” he said. He straightened his back, and tightened his robe. “I'm not feeling entirely well. It would be nice to get home.” Home, he heard himself say. He'd always taught her that this was home.

Marina looked out the window. Of course he wouldn't allow her to extend an invitation. He had to be in charge. It was good to know that she could so easily summon the energy to be annoyed at him; it was a sign that some part of her was still intact.

He was glad to see it, too, that impatient turning away. Maybe disgust would help pull her out of her torpor and depression—if he simply continued to behave like an insensitive father. And it came so naturally to him. But possibly, he thought, it was time to take matters in hand. Possibly, he thought, now was the moment for him to do something for Marina, protect his only child from the situation, The Cause—too late, he knew, but there was still a defense to be mounted. He had taught her to love Palestine; in some way, he had inflicted this terrible trial on her, and it was his obligation to help her now. He didn't want her caught up in some futile and dangerous retribution against this soldier, whoever he was. But what could George do? What could he do? Without Ibrahim, she was even more alone. It would be like Marina, with her sense of loyalty, to stay in Ramallah just to be near the husband's prison. And was Hassan interested in personal revenge? George wondered.

He heard an electronic beep coming from somewhere just outside the house—the roof, was it?

“What's that?” he asked Marina.

“Oh,” she said. “The washing machine. It's changing cycles, or so it claims.”

•  •  •

M
ARINA WENT TO
find the ironing board, which she hadn't seen in months. She found it folded up behind the armoire in the hallway. A few pushes and shoves dislodged it, and she carried it to the laundry room and set it up. This was how she was going to spend the rest of her life: washing, sorting, ironing, and folding. Philip's collar wouldn't stay down. She sprayed it. She sprayed blue jeans and tee shirts and underwear. Her iron made everything flat. She did Ibrahim's little shirts and even his socks. Flat, and flatter. It was a relief to watch the wrinkles disappear beneath the iron. Heat was passing over everything. The heavy iron sank into the folds of her father's blue shirt like an ocean liner, flattening the waves as it moved. It was a beautiful, magic eradication. She looked forward to ironing an infinity of cotton sheets.

•  •  •

L
ATER, ON HIS WAY
from the kitchen to find Philip, George passed Marina in the hallway. She was holding Ibrahim's neatly folded clothes ahead of her on her flat palms like some Oriental offering. George stopped her by putting a hand on her shoulder. He kissed her cheek and then looked at her closely. The hallway was dark. Half open on either side of them were closets overflowing with stacked linens wafting a fresh smell into the air. At the far end of the hall, a door to a bathroom where the shower had just been turned off was open, and a fog of steam swept down toward them. The carpeting was soft underfoot. George felt inappropriately uplifted, as if he were walking beneath a bower with a young girl on a spring night near the sea. Marina shook herself free as he inspected her face, and fled down the stairs to the baby's room.

T
O VENTURE INTO ENEMY TERRITORY,
that was how Doron thought of it at first. He located the Hajimi house through police records at the Russian Compound, where Hassan Hajimi was imprisoned. It was like a research project: First, Raad's books at the library. Then some treatises on Islam, and books of Muhammad's sayings. Now this. As he flipped through the long document—which listed former as well as current prisoners—Doron began to wonder who all these political prisoners were. The sergeant on duty watched him with folded arms. Doron was in civilian clothes: black jeans, a white tee shirt.

“Here it is,” Doron said to the sergeant, because the man seemed to require communication. Doron jotted the address down on a matchbook. He nodded at the sergeant, whose eyes flickered over Doron's face. He raised two skeptical eyebrows and quickly came over and took the heavy notebook from Doron.

Doron walked down through Musrara and across King David to the Old City. Enemy territory, he thought. Man with a mission. He was looking for a new wardrobe. He wound his way to Jaffa Gate and the souk, and began descending the main thoroughfare. He tried not to look out of place, but he felt huge and awkward and surrounded. He zigzagged through the crowds down to the bottom of the tourist market, past stalls selling tee shirts, chess sets, ceramics, candles and candelabras, round leather ottomans, silver jewelry, and gilt-sheathed daggers, and then turned left and headed toward Damascus Gate and the real market, where they sold things people needed. The place was crowded; Doron was certain he was the only Israeli here—if you were Israeli, you stayed well within the Jewish Quarter in the Old City unless you were looking for a fight.

He passed through the food market. Imploring wide-socketed skulls of butchered animals hung at waist height. Goats and cattle, possibly sheep, Doron couldn't tell. Behind the exotic aromas of cumin and coriander from the spice market, you could smell death. The broad stones of the alley were slick and black with water and bloody runoff from the butcher stalls. Women with shopping baskets and bags engaged in a cacophony of negotiation with the stall keepers. Bright oranges and lemons lit up the dark alleyways.

He turned down a narrow roofed alleyway and emerged from a world of skinned chickens into aisles piled with pants, stacked with scarves, festooned with hanging dresses, leggings, and children's clothes. Eager faces looked out at him from the stalls. It was less crowded here.

If he spoke Hebrew—no, he didn't even want to think about that. But if he spoke Arabic, his accent would give him away, he was sure. So, English—maybe they would not be able to detect his accent in a foreign language.

“Pants,” he said to a smiling man.

“Pants?” the man asked.

Doron pointed at the stack.

“Ah, trousers,” the man said.

“Yes, for me,” Doron said, pointing to his legs. The man showed him a pair of black polyester pants with a sharp crease down the front.

“You like?” he asked.

“Yes,” Doron said. He was assembling his disguise. He felt the excitement of adventure. Dress-up.

The man started wrapping the folded pants, and looked sideways up at Doron. Doron caught the look, and understood: Why was this foreigner buying these things? It didn't make sense.

Should he get a keffiyeh? They were hanging from a rack a few stalls down. Too obvious, he thought. And not everyone wears them. And could he ever figure out how to wrap one? Never. He settled on a scarf, a long woolen one. Palestinian men tied them around their necks with the two ends hanging down in front. Guaranteed to look authentic, Doron thought, as he put the scarf in his little black plastic bag along with the pants. Now a close-fitting knitted hat and a sweater-vest, and I'm ready.

He took everything back to his mother's empty house, and changed quickly, shoving his real clothes into the back of a closet. He didn't want to think too much about what he was doing. This would be normal, he thought, if I were doing it for the army, for some undercover unit, for some good reason. The greatest generals always had some story of dressing up like women and assassinating terrorists in distant Arab cities. But for him, there was no good reason. He was doing this simply because he felt compelled. He needed to know more; so far, he could explain nothing to himself. Not the boy's death, not the mother's strange allure, not his own involvement. If he got closer, maybe he'd see things more clearly.

And maybe not. But he had to try. He wanted more than anything to see Marina Raad again. He wondered: Was this normal? In any way? He turned her over in his mind. The black hair, the way it curled in the rain, and her frightened face, which she tried so hard to keep distant and haughty.

When he looked in the mirror, he thought he'd done a pretty good job. He wondered if Palestinians had a different way of walking; he thought so. Israelis moved aggressively; the Palestinians were more cautious. He would try a cautious walk, then, and keep himself as invisible as possible. He pulled his hat down low over his forehead, put one hand in his pocket, and fitted the other with a cigarette. He looked at himself again, and a Palestinian looked back.

•  •  •

F
ROM THE STREET
, you could barely see the house. It was perched on a hill overlooking the Ramallah road, and only its roof was visible from the street that was listed as its mailing address. Fig trees grew in the garden. Their dark green tops rattled up against the roof in the sandy winter wind. There was a rusting red tricycle sitting in a corner of the rooftop. Some old, dusty, machine-made prayer rugs had been scattered here and there. In front of one section that had been covered with makeshift tin, a clothesline ran. Flowered sheets whipped along it. The flapping sheets waved him away, warned him off. The day was dark and the sky was an ochre color that signaled that the
hamsin
was coming again.

Doron hated the desert wind: it coated cars with a film of yellow sand, it got up your nose, it made you cough, and worst of all, it reminded you that Jerusalem, with its McDonald's and Burger Kings and nice red buses and nice red post offices and its green gardens and flowering terraces and public buildings flanked by fountains, was actually right on the edge of an ancient desert where camels and cactuses and Bedouins were the only successful species.