Martyrs’ Crossing (18 page)

He saw that there was no door from the house onto this street. He left his unhappy taxi driver waiting and went around the corner. He hoped no one would see him; they would probably be able to spot him as an impostor right away. Down the hill was the Ramallah road, always busy, its intersections and lanes filled with potential and actual car crashes. Across from the house was a big empty lot. Bits of paper trash skittered along its broken ground, and piles of construction materials—tiles, cement blocks, bags of sand—stood in heaps waiting for the day, long distant, no doubt, when someone would manage to scrape up the money to build something here and also get around to doing it. Facing the Hajimis' driveway was a big green overflowing garbage dumpster. Doron decided he would stand just a little behind it and wait for Marina to come out.

He pulled his wool hat down a bit further around his head. He put the collar of his shirt up against the wind, pulled his sweater-vest tighter, and double-wrapped his long wool scarf, letting its tails hang down at the sides of his neck. He lit a cigarette. Now he looked like someone he would normally avoid. He move farther behind the dumpster, so that he could just see around it. Certainly she would come out. A Muslim mother was not allowed a long mourning period, especially if her son had died a martyr. Not that Doron imagined that Marina Raad was a particularly devout Muslim.

Doron hadn't learned much about Islam in his few short days in the library, but he had dipped into a few handbooks in Hebrew and English. First of all, Muhammad (“Peace Be Upon Him,” as they said in the books) was always on horseback, which seemed oddly heroic to Doron, who imagined his own prophets as outcasts with mud-caked hair, ranting on street corners, or elderly men with long beards and shepherds' crooks—their transportation at its best an old jackass. The Prophet of Allah (Peace Be Upon Him) rode horses and pitched tents and dug trenches for battle, working with shovels and pickaxes. He was like an Israeli pioneer. He made miracles in which rocks turned to sand and a girl's apronful of dates was made to feed hundreds of trench diggers. He caused lightning to flash from beneath the blow of his pickax. He claimed Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus as early prophets of Islam. Like so many of these fellows who purveyed the word of God, Muhammad (PBUH—they abbreviated it in the books) seemed to have had a quirky mind, with opinions on everything. “Do not wear silk,” he is supposed to have told Muslim men. The sexual proscriptions and advice were particularly interesting: according to another book, the Prophet said, “A man is not allowed to have a woman and her paternal aunt as two wives simultaneously, nor a woman and her maternal aunt.” Probably the translations were not great, Doron thought.

In any case, you could certainly find equally silly precepts in Judaism. Do not wear blends of linen and wool. Why? And the other day, Doron had heard that an important rabbi in Jerusalem—some jerk with an Old Testament name who wore a high hat and a rich cape encrusted with gold and jewels—had advised religious men not to walk between two women, just as it is written that a man should not walk between two donkeys or two camels, for fear of becoming like them. And that same rabbi declared—no doubt after giving it a lot of thought—that it
was
permissible for an Orthodox man to pick his nose on the Sabbath, but Alka-Seltzer was off-limits because it fizzed. Doron could never take religion seriously.

Doron stood there and inhaled the dust and fumes from the Ramallah road, along with his own cigarette smoke. There were things no Israeli did. No Israeli went to Ramallah: it was enemy territory, a place where they wanted to kill you, like certain places in the Old City. The Authority was in charge in Ramallah. If an Israeli walked down the street in Ramallah, these days, he'd get knifed, people said. But there was no avoiding it for Doron—this little wasteland in Ramallah, his post at the dumpster. He was afraid that Marina might see him—that if she did, she would recognize him, and after that, who knew what might happen. And there was some little, contrary, dangerous feeling in him, too: he hoped maybe she would see him.

Two men were walking down the hill, talking. Doron tried to look relaxed as they approached. They squinted at him, and he thought, What if they speak to me? He drew on his cigarette in what he hoped was a Palestinian way, and kicked at the dirt, looking down, waiting for them to go on. They stopped. He didn't look up. He heard the sound of a lighter being flicked, an exchange of words. He kept his eyes on the ground. The men stood for a moment more, then continued on. Doron lifted his eyes after they passed, and watched them recede down the hill. He tossed his cigarette and tucked himself behind the dumpster.

The whole neighborhood used the dumpster, and a bad smell spilled out of it—old canned fish, dirty diapers. He closed his eyes, and the scene at the checkpoint came back to him. He saw himself at the communications controls. He remembered Zvili's angry face and the boy's scared blue eyes. At the bottom of the hill, a car screeched, glass shattered, and there was distant heated shouting. Closer to Doron, a man's voice said goodbye. In English. A door opened.

Doron peered around the dumpster. Marina was coming out of the garden gate, walking toward the street with the young man Doron had seen at the funeral with her father. Her face was half hidden by a silk scarf and sunglasses. The two of them stood there, silent, staring across the street at the dumpster and the empty lot, and for a moment, Doron thought they had seen him. He pulled his head back a few centimeters. The young man looked at his watch, and then checked the street. He shook his head. Marina stood stiffly apart. She leaned lightly against the wall of the garden. An askadinia tree brushed its thick pointed leaves against her shoulder.

They waited. Doron waited with them. He was beginning to feel imprisoned by the vigil when finally their taxi arrived and they set off. Doron hurried up the hill and around the corner to his waiting cab and jumped in. He watched Marina's taxi as it plunged and bucked through the traffic on the Ramallah road.

At the side of the street, small children walked with their mothers to the market. At every intersection, young men were waiting to be picked up by jitneys and driven across the checkpoint to the Israeli side of Jerusalem for day work. Today they would wait in vain—the closure was still in force—but they were eternally desperate and eternally hopeful. Through the small crack in his cab's curtains, Doron saw a fresh graffito on the walls that were bouncing past. Then he saw it again. He tried to sound it out in his iffy Arabic each time he passed it, translating as he went along. He saw it again. Ah, an “s” sound. He heard himself hissing, “Ssssss, ssssssss.” And then he realized what it said.
FIND THE SOLDIER.
Find the soldier. Soldier, he recognized the whole word, now. It was a word he had learned in training, a long time ago. The CD disk that his driver had hung with a red ribbon from the rearview mirror jumped up and down to the rhythm of the traffic like some kind of measuring device, a meter of impending disaster. Specks of light flicked off it. Doron had always assumed that the disks must be symbolic in some way for Muslims, like the rounded-off crescents that topped so many mosques and minarets. Endless frittering useless thoughts crackled across his brain. He sat back. His stomach bounced. He let himself relax into the car's worn vinyl upholstery. His taxi followed the same rocking trajectory as Marina's. Find the soldier. Like a child's game.

G
EORGE COULD FEEL EVERYONE LOOKING
at him when he entered the meeting room at Orient House. He used to enjoy being the center of attention when he came to these gatherings, but not anymore and not under these circumstances. Were they looking at him in a new light because of Ibrahim? Philip stayed close, but offered no real protection against the onslaught. He had come to Jerusalem this morning with Marina to see Hassan's lawyer and met George just outside Orient House. Ahmed boomed up to George with his big, healthy body. You hardly noticed the dozen or so other men, Ahmed was so imposing.

“George,” he said, embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks and then taking his hand—actually grabbing it as it hung at George's side, lifting it up and taking it. George looked down at his hand. He looked up at Ahmed.

“Come,” Ahmed said, dropping George's hand. How like Ahmed not to mention Ibrahim, here, to understand instinctively what was called for and, more to the point, what was not. George was uncharacteristically eager to belong, not to feel the wrenching alienation he'd been overwhelmed by since his last visit. Look at Ahmed: Here was the man who had stood by him in spite of their differences. George tried to convince himself that here, he was protected.

“Thank you,” George whispered to him as they made their way across the room to the conference table. He held Ahmed's strong, sinewy arm. It had been decades since they leaned against each other in this familiar way, not considering politics and the oceans that divided them. Possibly, George thought, this is the meaning of home. There was something about the warmth of Ahmed's greeting that made George believe he had come around to George's way of thinking—that Ibrahim was no longer to be used as part of the Authority's negotiating arsenal.

“Sit,” said Ahmed, pulling out a high-backed chair at the table for George. He laid a proprietary hand on George's shoulder after he was seated. He looked at the others, who were talking, smoking, and nodding in small groups around the room.

“Let's begin,” Ahmed said. He sat down at the head of the table, his knee touching George's. George looked around the table.

Philip leaned over to George and whispered, “I don't like it.”

Philip must be feeling something I'm not, George thought. Something I should get that I'm not getting. Am I being used, trapped?

“They're up to something,” Philip said. “Don't you feel it?”

Up to no good, Grandfather would say.

Again, Philip leaned and spoke into George's ear. “ ‘Find the soldier,' ” he said. They had commented on the recurring graffiti as they rode in from Ramallah.

“Yah?” whispered George.

“That's what this is about,” said Philip. “Watch.”

Ahmed began to speak. He riffled through a large loose-leaf notebook as he talked, but it was plain that he was not reading from its contents. It was a prop. A relief map of Palestine hung on the wall behind him.

“Many things have happened in the past few weeks,” Ahmed said. “I am sure you are all aware.” He looked around the table, letting his eyes meet each man's, before going on. Ahmed motioned to a slender man standing behind him, who approached the table.

“More coffee,” Ahmed said quietly, dismissing him to his task with a small backward wave of the hand. A platter of symmetrically arranged sweets sat in the middle of the conference table. Ahmed plucked one out and took a small bite of it. He wiped his lips neatly with a napkin.

“We have seen the closing of the checkpoints.” He turned a page in his notebook, as if marking off that example.

“We have seen the arrest of scores of our young men.” He turned another page. George speculated on the actual contents of the notebook: Maps of borders described in the peace agreements? Details of the February operating costs for Orient House? Old printouts of foreign-aid disbursements?

“The Israelis have demanded that we arrest certain Hamas figures, and we have done so—some of them are still in our custody. Yet since the bombings the other day, the Israelis have abandoned the talks as if they thought the
Authority
were responsible,” he said. Another page.

“And finally, there has been the recent murder of a Palestinian baby,” said Ahmed, gazing mildly down the center of the table, avoiding all eyes. George stared at the notebook as Ahmed slowly turned another page. Philip kicked him under the table.

“The Israelis are not serious about peace, as we know. We've tried to work with them, to negotiate. We have given them everything we can give them, in order to advance the process. We have waited for them to recover from violence before. But that moment has passed.” He gave them the all-encompassing look again. The others seated around the table wagged their heads. Ahmed pulled at the ends of his keffiyeh, an addition to his wardrobe that George found irritating. Here come The Palestinian People, he thought.

“The Palestinian people will no longer tolerate inaction in the face of Israeli intransigence,” Ahmed said. George looked at him over the steeple of his long surgeon's fingers. Ahmed was looking at him. Coffee arrived and Ahmed poured it into their tiny cups. Big men with tiny cups. Ahmed was dangerous, with his glinting eyes and his keffiyeh and his tiny sweet cup of coffee. That's what Philip would say. George considered the concept.

“And that is why, beginning today, we are going to start—quietly and with dignity—to encourage the people to continue coming out to the checkpoints to protest the inhumane treatment of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis.” Ahmed looked around at the nodding table.