Martyrs’ Crossing (2 page)

He nodded to Zvili, and Zvili prepared a tear-gas cartridge. The young men were moving in closer, their pitching arms back. Doron nodded again.

Zvili fired off the cartridge. It soared up into the air and then plummeted down like the tail end of a firework, exploding on descent. The crowd opened up around it. Breaking through the ring of those who were fleeing, a young man with a kerchief around his face ran up to the spewing cartridge, picked it up, and galloped toward the checkpoint like a strange tribal smoke-dancer, stopping finally a few meters from Doron's line of defense to hurl the cartridge back at the Israelis. Doron coughed and bent over, and tears bit at his eyes. He felt for a second as if he were going to black out, the stuff was so fucking strong. Should have shot him, he thought. When Doron stood finally after the cramp in his lungs had abated, he saw the boy scampering back into a rejoicing crowd.

Doron wished these battles did not have to be so intimate. He coughed into the back of his hand. There was something too much like children's games about being at such close quarters with the enemy. It was like hide-and-seek, or a color war. They ran up to you, you chased them back. They conked your guy, you conked theirs. You got to know each other by the end of a day. You could take the measure of certain individuals. He hated seeing their joy at a wounded soldier, and wished he could take the same raw pleasure in their injuries. He wanted to want them dead. But God, he just wished that these people had stayed home today. He wished that they would stay home every day.

•  •  •

“H
OLD ON,
hold on, hold on here,” a voice shouted through the crowd. No one could see who was talking. An old man's walking stick thudded against Marina. People jostled her from both sides, stepped-on toes crunching like pebbles underfoot. The car alarm was still wailing. The crowd lurched forward; someone was pushing from behind. Marina felt one of her shoes come loose, and then it was gone.

The crowd stumbled backward a few paces as the soldiers advanced toward them. Gunfire popped. For a moment, everyone stood still. I have to get out of here, Marina thought. But she couldn't afford to leave. She had to get to the checkpoint, and through it, now. So this was total closure, she thought, an occasion for riot, a mini uprising. And then there were the people, like her, who really needed to get across. Four years in this place, and she still had learned nothing.

A slight breeze blew a cloud of gas over them. Marina put her shirt over Ibrahim's face. He was gasping. Tears were coursing down her own face, too, from the gas. She stood up against the side of a photocopy store, panting. The crowd was running away from the checkpoint, now, but young men still stood around, in corners, behind walls, down alleys, waiting for the next assault.

A man standing next to her offered his handkerchief. He pulled a small plastic bottle of scented toilet water from his bag and poured it over the white square.

“Here,” he said.

She took it gratefully and put it over the boy's nose and mouth. The man smiled briefly, and then looked back out at the wildly scattering crowd. He was thin, and his suit was shabby in the local style: a little too long in the cuffs, worn at the elbows, cut too sharply, glossy at the collar, the lapels too broad. A West Bank professional of some kind, Marina guessed. An accountant, or a dentist.

She thanked the man over and over for his kindness.

“It is nothing,” he said. “You keep that.” He turned away.

Marina closed her eyes. A vision of the Star Market on Mass Ave in Cambridge came abruptly into her head. The piled-up apples. Pyramids of boxes containing macaroni and cheese mix. The wide corridor of frozen foods. The soups with the soups, the dog bones with the dog bones, bags with bags, meat with meat. The spray that rained down on the vegetables every ten minutes like a passing sun shower. The quick click of the cashiers. In every way, life was orderly there.

Marina wanted life to be normal, whatever that was. She wanted to be at home with her baby. She wanted to feel his head and call Dr. Miller's office and have them say, Yes, come in, and then get in a car and drive him over, like a normal person. And have them say, He's fine, don't worry, calm down, everything is going to be fine. Ibrahim had a very bad cold, you'd think it was nothing. But the last time he'd had a cold with a fever, he'd begun to come up short for breath, and then he wasn't breathing right at all, and she ended up rushing him through the checkpoint to Jerusalem, to Hadassah, and Dr. Miller had hurried over to see him. Ibrahim lay in a hospital bed, with his blue eyes looking up over the green plastic nebulizer mask, a drip in his arm, and she had felt like collapsing, but at least Dr. Miller had been there, saying he's going to be fine.

That was last month and all the days before. But now something—many things—had changed. You couldn't even get near the checkpoint because of the demonstrators and the crowd. She thought of her father, who had left Ramallah last week, and the small crowd of admirers who had stood on her doorstep, waving goodbye at his disappearing taxi. He was heading back to America. Marina felt a pang of nostalgia for the Boston winters of her childhood, for snowboots and slush. She imagined her father in snowy Cambridge now, sitting comfortably with his reading glasses down near the tip of his nose or lounging in front of the television watching tennis.
He
would never get caught in a situation like this. During his visits, her father, with all of his ties to the Authority, managed swift and unlimited checkpoint crossings for himself—whenever he wished, which was not very often—each one planned carefully in advance, each strategically fixed: the right car one day, VIP documents the next, a connected driver, whatever it took. But today, Marina had been caught by surprise. No time for arrangements. Ibrahim's breath came in gasps. She watched the crowd rush by. Rabble, that would be the word that would rise to her father's lips, even though he'd never say it.

•  •  •

I
T WAS GETTING DARKER
. That was help from on high, thought Doron. The clouds might bring darkness earlier than expected. He hoped so, he hoped so. One of Doron's men had been hit. It wasn't serious but blood was flowing down into his eyes, which did not exactly raise morale. Doron looked up at the sky. If only God would send a message down the way he used to, publicly and unmistakably. Instead, rain clouds, gunfire, boys with stones, dust.

Doron watched the kerchiefed boys preparing another onslaught. He knew that what was unhappily called a situation had developed on his watch. Behind the boys, the crowd was moving toward the checkpoint again. Doron thought about percussion grenades, good for stopping animal stampedes—or starting them—and for stopping running crowds in their tracks without causing casualties. Certainly no matter what he ended up doing, it would be found that he had done something wrong, had forgotten to do something, had neglected something that right now, right now, should seem utterly obvious to him as a course of action. He was sure that firing on the crowd at this point would be a mistake. On the other hand, he didn't want to be a sitting duck for some kind of unprecedented attack on the checkpoint.

“Let's launch a sound bomb,” Doron said. It was getting too close, they were getting too cocky. It had to end. There was a moment past which you could not let things continue, or the escalation might prove unstoppable. Doron stood out in front of his men while they prepared the percussion weapon. Rocks were coming at him from three sides. It was raining rocks. Doron felt an urgent need to reassert control. He knew he could do it. It was going to happen now. We can always win, he thought. He reminded himself: The one who gains victory in close quarters is the one with superior firepower—and the will to use it. That last bit had always been Doron's problem.

•  •  •

A
SHATTERING NOISE
shook the ground. They are bombing us, Marina thought. That's impossible. She had never heard of bombs, not at the checkpoints. This one was so loud the shock seemed to continue in waves under her feet like an earthquake. She trembled and thought about natural disasters. She didn't see anyone lying bloody and wounded, the way they would after a bombing. No buildings collapsed.

Another tremor rattled the ground. Maybe they're trying to end it, Marina thought. The windows of the businesses along the street rattled and one or two shattered as another blast shook the street. She closed her eyes tight and prayed that they would get across. She tried to make her way to the checkpoint, but the crowd kept pushing her back.

•  •  •

D
ORON WATCHED
the crowd flee from the waves of the explosion. The blast rippled under his feet and he thought it would toss him into the air. The crowd felt the same thing: it was like an earthquake. He gave a signal to launch another bomb. One or two more, and they'd be so far gone they would never regroup. Doron wished fervently never to see another Palestinian. Dream on, he said to himself, tapping his foot, waiting for the end, his gun at the ready.

In a few minutes, he knew it was over. No shouting, no tramping, no stones. Not a single one.

“Hooray,” he heard Zvili say to another man.

Hooray is right, Doron thought. It was over for today. As usual, the sound grenades had worked, combined with a massive dose of tear gas and a few strategic bursts of shots fired into the air. At least there would be an interlude of calm until tomorrow, although it would be an interlude filled with stretchers on the Palestinian side, and exhausted, bleeding soldiers at the checkpoint. His men were gathering around the watchtower. Now was the time to deal with the aftermath. Normally, the men would all be smoking after such an afternoon, but they were coughing too hard. Dust caked over the bloody face of the man who'd been hit, a private, first time on the checkpoint. He was looking for water and a towel. Doron handed him his water bottle as he passed by. A light injury—but he'd send the man to get stitched up, anyway.

Doron could see several yards of road now, a stretch of beautiful, radiant, black macadam, with no one standing on it. The roadbed. Amazing. He looked at the few yards of blackness as if it were an old buddy returning from war. He wanted to kiss it, slap it on the back, offer it a beer. The road was decorated with dust, dirt, sand, rubble, and stray sandals and shoes lost in the melee.

Not everyone left, of course. There were always a few troublemakers, and some people who, Doron supposed,
were
desperate to get across. But wouldn't. Zvili appeared at his side and handed him a cigarette. Doron took it and looked at Zvili with a pained smile on his face.

“Good work, Lieutenant,” Zvili said.

“Thank God it's over,” said Doron. They went into the trailer.

It was growing dark fast. Zvili flicked on the fluorescent bulb with an elbow. Two of the men who had been out front had returned to the trailer. One parked himself at the desk near the radio with his feet up, and the other sat backward on a metal folding chair, reading the log sheet. The bleeding soldier stood against the wall in a dark corner, with a bloody piece of someone's old shirt balled in his hand and blood still trickling into his eye and down his face. He shook his head as Doron examined him.

“You've got to have someone see that,” Doron said. Doron took the bloody rag and made some swipes at the private's face.

“I'm fine,” said the man.

“Don't be brave,” said Doron.

Zvili polished his sunglasses on the edges of his flak jacket. He returned them to their case.

“Everything cool?” asked Zvili, looking out. This was code.

“Yes,” said Doron. “No one dead, as far as I can tell.” They watched as an injured man on a stretcher was carried away in the direction of Ramallah. It was always possible that a couple of Palestinians would turn up dead after the riots finished; people you hadn't noticed go down.

“So what else?” Zvili asked. “What are we going to do with these folks?” He gestured to the stragglers coming up the road. “Look at that guy,” he said, pointing at a man in a suit, standing near the bench outside. “Why the fuck does he need to get across, I'd like to know. I mean really.”

“Don't worry,” said Doron. “He's not going anywhere. One guy came through this morning. Authority. Special plates and a special paper just for today. That's been it. Orders are no exceptions. Headquarters is scared shitless. They don't want anyone sneaking through. They've even closed off the wadi.”

“Yeah,” said Zvili. “Makes me want to cry.”

Sometimes, Doron wished there was something really bad he could do to Zvili, instead of fucking over all these pointless Palestinians. Still, the world would be a better place with no Palestinians in it, he often thought. And Zvili was his comrade, supposedly. He had worked with him before at this checkpoint. He had even had a beer at Zvili's house after a hard day. Once. He tried not to dislike Zvili, but Zvili didn't make it easy. Doron turned to the guardroom.

“Be down in a minute,” he said. He walked out and climbed slowly up the metal staircase to the watchtower. He liked to survey things at sundown—this was his personal minaret. The man on watch edged aside, and Doron peered down. Things seemed normal. It looked like every night along this road. It was colder, darker, too, without the headlights from the usual traffic that was deterred tonight. Cypresses rose like the shadows of flames from the crest of the hill running behind the wadi. The rain would start soon.

•  •  •

D
OWN ON THE
road, everyone headed home, shocked by the sound bombs and undone by the growing dark and the storm that was descending. But Marina could not go home. Ibrahim's eyes were closed. He wheezed loudly at the end of each short breath. The crowd was breaking up, each person an individual again, with his own plans for the night. The man stationed up in the watchtower leaned on the window ledge with a bored look on his face, pointing his machine gun down at a straggling line of people who were making their way toward the checkpoint in the near dark.