Martyrs’ Crossing (25 page)

She had that mental picture of him, and many others, but each time her private remembrance of him was brought up to date with an actual visit, he seemed to have turned into someone else, a flat empty thing with only one characteristic: one month an angry man, the next, a thin man; one month, a lonely man, the next, hopeless—and not the vivid, complete, compact, brilliant, magnetic person he was when they married. He had slipped out of the stream of humanity. Prison was turning him into a “Palestinian”—after all, he was a political prisoner, and he was in prison not because he was charming and handsome or sad and lonely, but because he was Palestinian. Over time, he was conforming to his jailers' preconceptions, becoming a distillation of stereotypes of his own refugee race: thin, sun-blasted, angry, hopeless, voluble yet unreachable.

One of the women came to the net and hit a hard crosscourt backhand that left her opponent looking disheartened and woebegone. Marina heard her father's breath go in and out, a slow, reassuring sound. Hassan's hands and his voice and his belief—the man he was—had been her visa back into Palestine, a Palestine other than the dead romantic one her father had envisioned for her, that fairyland of cypress and palm and stone. Hassan had taken her and led her into another place, where there were no wealthy landholding grandfathers, no grass tennis courts, no country tours on velocipede, but instead the yearning call to prayer, and refugee camps and villages on windblown hillsides.

Teaching her about her homeland had been a passion: You call yourself a Palestinian? Hassan would ask, when she would say something particularly naive. And then he would instruct her. He had pulled her out of her father's Jerusalem of a half century earlier, and into Ramallah now. She remembered him holding Ibrahim in the visitors' cell. At least my son is free, he would say at the end of every visit, forgetting he had said it the time before. She was afraid for Hassan now that Ibrahim was dead, and afraid of him at the same time. Even his tenderness was aggressive.

They had been trying to get Marina and her father to go to that rally tomorrow. The head of the student league at Bir Zeit had called, ostensibly to offer his condolences but really to invite them. He said the students wanted her to speak, as well as George. She might just go to the rally—she would never speak, but she might accompany her father if he decided to go. Family solidarity. She could hide behind him.

George stirred as the commercials came on: commercials were always louder than the regular programming. Marina coughed to wake him. She wanted company. She coughed again, louder. She'd sewn his button on, admittedly slightly off-center, but nonetheless undeniably attached.

Marina looked over at her father: he was waking up, reassembling his features, putting the mask back on.

She tossed the shirt to him and it landed in his lap.

He picked it up.

“Oh, right,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “Thanks.”

He looked at the television.

“Who's winning?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Doesn't matter,” he said.

Philip came in, coughing a little as he usually did to announce his presence.

“Whatever is cooking smells wonderful,” he said. He smiled at Marina with those generous, compassionate brown eyes. She felt tears come into her own. God, was she so vulnerable that a compliment on her cooking could make her cry?

Philip handed a newspaper to George.

“They are disgraceful,” Philip said. Marina could see a large spread of photographs, and headlines in Hebrew.

George looked at the paper, and made a small noise of disgust. He shook his head.

“Oh my, Philip,” he said.

Philip nodded.

“I am
so
sorry, Marina,” Philip said. He shook his head at her and left the room.

“What is it?” she asked her father.

“This,” he said, and handed her newspaper. It was
Ha'aretz,
she saw.

She only looked at it for half a second, and then she stood and walked quickly from the room with the paper rolled in her hand.

“Marina!” her father shouted after her.

She locked the bathroom door, sat down, and stared at the thing. She couldn't read the Hebrew, but she knew what they were saying. There was her husband as a boy, holding the hand of his older sister Fatima. Next to that old picture was one that had been used once already, on the day after the incident, a picture of Marina walking Ibrahim down a street in Ramallah. The pictures were so similar, it could have been the same street. And Hassan and Ibrahim looked so much alike—she had never noticed it before. But the Israelis certainly had. Daddy terrorist, baby terrorist. That was the implication; she knew without being able to read. All she could see was Ibrahim. On her lap. She covered the pictures with her hands.

After a while, she put the paper aside, folded, and stood up to wash her face. She looked at herself: bedraggled, woebegone. Her black hair hung straight down around her face. Under her eyes were circles.

She walked into the living room where her father was standing, waiting for her return. He shook his head at her. She put the folded newspaper into his outstretched hands, not looking at him. She wanted to remain in control. Pushing aside her sewing kit, she sat down.

A bus's horn blared out from down on the road.

Let's cause her more pain, George said to himself. The conversation could not wait, he had decided when she ran out of the room. She knew the same secret he knew. Here I go, Lord help me.

“I had a most peculiar lunch today,” George said.

“What happened?” Marina asked dully. She clicked off the set and pulled her chair around to face his.

“It was the company that was strange, actually.” She was so sweet-looking with her hair down, like a dark Rapunzel, gazing at him without her habitual hostility, for some reason. Well, that was about to end.

“Wasn't Philip with you?”

“He brought someone, a lawyer from Ramallah. Actually the lawyer said he was there at the checkpoint the other night.”

“Oh,” Marina said.

“Yup,” said George. He pulled up his socks, and looked around for his shoes. Even in front of his daughter, he did not like to be unkempt.

“So how was Moscobiyyeh today, by the way?” he asked her as he bent over his shoelaces.

“Fine.”

“And what does he think?”

“Say his name, Daddy.” It was hard for her father to bend all the way over his shoes, she noticed. He was breathing hard.

“What?”

“Say his name.”

He looked up at her. He could hear his heart beating. He did not want to pick his head up too fast.

“Hassan,” he said. “What does Hassan think?”

“What does he think? About what?”

“What does he want to do with the name, Marina?”

“I don't think he knows the soldier's name,” she said. “Is that what we're talking about?”

“Yes,” said George. “Yes, that's exactly what we're talking about.” He summoned a flinty glare for Marina, a look she hadn't seen in a long time, but not one she had forgotten.

“Do you know the name, Marina?” George asked. The flinty glare was gone. “Because I do.”

“The lawyer from Ramallah,” she said after a pause. “He told you?”

“Yup,” George said. “He told me. Seemed to feel it was his duty. He says he forced the soldier to let you into the trailer.”

“That's when everything started to get really bad,” Marina said. She remembered the heat of Ibrahim's flushed skin against her hands as she sat on that flimsy metal chair. She had put her hands under his sweatshirt to see how bad his retractions were. She remembered the feel of him heating up in her arms.

She stood up, turning away from her father. She picked her sewing kit up from the small rattan table next to her chair, and zipped it shut.

“It was a very bad night, sweetheart,” George said to her.

Her back shook slightly. He wanted to go over to her, but he wasn't sure. Could she stand it? Could he?

“I can't, I still can't talk about it,” she said.

“We don't have to,” George said.

“Maybe we do have to,” Marina said, her face still averted. “But I can't.”

“Do you want me to go to Ahmed with the name?”

“Uncle Ahmed?” Marina asked. “No. No. Why should we tell Uncle Ahmed? I haven't even told Hassan.”

Good, George thought.

“And Hassan deserves to know,” she said. “Ahmed doesn't. This is what I think: The soldier was there. That makes him a useful symbol: that's why my
uncle
is so interested in him. But there's more to it. There's more.”

“Like?”

“He was trying to get an okay for us to go across. But there was a problem.”

“A problem.”

“On the phone. He ran into a problem; it was all set, and then there was a problem.”

“What was the problem?”

“
Who
was the problem. There was someone he was talking to, he got bumped up from person to person, and at the end there was a problem with who we were, or something, he kept saying ‘Hajimi, Hajimi,' and things like ‘I don't care who the father is the boy is sick, sick, sick—
mamash, mamash choleh
'—I couldn't understand everything, it was in Hebrew, but I understood that.”

“So?”

“So then, well, at first I could see he was just going to do what they said, obey orders. He kept saying sorry to me, as if that would make it all right. But then a little while later, he looked at us again and he could see it was so bad, so bad, and he said, basically, he was going to let us in. I could hear the ambulance coming, but . . .”

George looked at her back. Tears surprised him, overflowing his eyes. He wiped them away quickly.

“It seemed so quick, all of a sudden,” she said.

“Oh, Marina,” he said.

There was a long silence. Her shoulders trembled, but there were no sobs. The afternoon light filtered in through the shutters. The neighbors' television droned on and on.

“So,” she said finally. “So, I just feel something about him.”

“You mean, the Israeli.”

“Yes, him. The commanding officer.”

“And what's the something you feel, sweetheart?”

“That we went through it together. That he was trying to be on my side.” There. She had said it. It wasn't something she wanted to admit. She was furious with the soldier. She couldn't bear the thought of him. But there was no denying one thing. He had been trying to be on their side. She could never admit it to Hassan, because Hassan could never allow it to be true. His whole world was built on another point of view. Drunken dogs, killers, usurpers, evil, the devil. She knew the litany, had never argued with it. She agreed more or less. Her father was pretty much in accord, too.

But her father would be able to understand her confusion. Confusion was repugnant to Hassan. Whereas George's element was ambiguity, ambivalence.

“That's what I think, anyway,” she said. “And that I don't want my husband to get involved with this. Finding the soldier is beside the point to me. Not to Uncle Ahmed, but to me. One stupid soldier is not to blame.”

“Maybe.” George looked at the blank television screen.

“You would say: ‘It's not the individual, it is the state. The state is criminal, the individual is merely acting in accordance with an inhuman and unacceptable system.' ”

“Is that what I'd say?”

“It's what you
have
said, actually.” She sat back down on the chair that faced his.

“And yet, there are Israelis and there are Israelis.”

“Not according to my husband.”

“Say his name, Marina.”

“Hassan says, and I know he's dogmatic, that you cannot—you
must
not—distinguish among Israelis: each one is a criminal, because the state is criminal. He starts from your proposition, but reaches the opposite conclusion.”

That's why she loves him, thought George.

“Ahhhh,” he said. “A hard man. No exemption for the innocent.”

She sat quietly for a minute. “He's not a hard man, Daddy.”

“Yes he is, rabbit. He's hard. Just not to you. I hope.”

“He's not hard at all. He's broken, now.” She began to cry, but without drama. Just tears coming down.

“Life is wretched,” George said. He watched her, but even under his scrutiny, she did not stop crying. Slowly, he cranked himself up from his chair and went over to her. She just sat there, staring blankly at his now-empty chair, with tears running down her cheeks and falling onto her sewing kit. There he was, next to her. He put a hand on her shoulder and she put one of hers up to cover his, as if in thanks. Thanks for what, he asked himself. Thanks for nothing.

Marina looked like a refugee, still wearing the long dark robe she often wore for shopping. He wanted to whisk her away from all this. She should be living in a split-ranch with a station wagon in the driveway, poor darling—or in a bohemian Parisian penthouse. Not in these drab Ramallah quarters. And her husband. He should be an orthodontist in Chicago—or an artist or a professor, not a bitter, deprived man, incarcerated in some sandy dungeon, gloomily plotting the destruction of his enemies. Her baby should not be moldering in the grave. Her father should not be leaving her this terrible legacy. George was growing impatient. He wanted to do something, not just go pat, pat, pat, there, there.

Marina wiped her eyes and moved away from her father's comforting hand.

“I'm going to go fix dinner,” she said. She folded his mended shirt and put it on the coffee table.

“Can I help?” George asked.

She looked at him and shook her head. He watched her leave.

•  •  •

P
HILIP CAME BACK
into the room, as if he'd been waiting just outside for the correct moment to return.