Martyrs’ Crossing (30 page)

But what was this, now? There was so much that did not occur to an Israeli soldier, he thought, as he got out of his taxi, which had been forced to stop when the driver encountered roads completely blocked by crowds. Fuck, there was no mistaking it. People milling all over and the sound of nearby gunfire. And now he was on the wrong side, unarmed, with this stupid scarf around his stupid neck but no slingshot in
his
back pocket. They were all running toward the checkpoint, and he ran too. No choice, really, once you were in it. You were just swept up by the crowd. The sheer stupidity of himself and this situation—oh, it was so easy to fuck up and get killed, especially if you had no plan and did things impulsively. They were near the checkpoint, now, and bullets were whizzing past him right and left. He felt an odd kind of surprise about these bullets, a mirrory feeling that he was firing and being fired on. A man dropped to the ground next to him and Doron tried to help him, but the crowd pushed Doron on. He heard the helicopters before anyone else, and looked up behind the watchtower. Three specks were approaching in a white sky.

I'll go through the wadi, he decided. He thought he would hide himself in the dry riverbed in the shadow of the abandoned buses and trucks, and under the scattered willows. The helicopters have more important business than one poor lone Palestinian.

He pushed slowly and with great difficulty toward the edge of the crowd. As the helicopters neared, people began shifting direction. Doron felt he was trying to part a sea. Finally, he reached a side alley. Everyone was ducking and running and stumbling as the sound bombs exploded, but not Doron, who knew exactly what was happening. It was funny, he thought, how even people who come out every day, day after day, as these guys probably have for at least several days now, are still put off by those bombs. Because they never knew. He supposed they mistrusted the Israelis so much that what had been sound bombs the day before might well be real bombs today. And they were right, because just then, the helicopters began firing down on the crowd.

Doron was crouching behind a row of low commercial buildings, as block by block he took himself farther and farther away from the main road, which meant he had less cover, but was also farther from the action. He felt less threatened now, except that to Palestinians, he would cut an odd figure, a young man ready for action who was distinctly avoiding it. Possibly he wouldn't run into anyone, since everyone from around here was either hiding inside or participating. He sniffed a trace of tear gas in the air but it was far enough away. He ran and ran, keeping low and tight and almost touching the buildings and garden walls.

It was a real fight over by the checkpoint, a firefight. He could hear rounds of machine-gun spray. Thank God he'd pulled away from there. The wadi lay rutted and windswept before him. He was right, by now, the scene at the checkpoint was too intense for the Israelis to spare manpower for the wadi—he saw no one on watch. In any case, getting across to Jerusalem was no longer what these protests were really about. He gritted his teeth and leaned up against a dumpster, trying to decide which was the fastest and safest way down through and across. Trucks and buses had been abandoned down in the wadi, some of them long ago, but many many others only recently, when the Israelis had stopped them and repeatedly refused them entry. The Palestinian truckers left the vehicles there for better political times, took their produce off by hand and found other ways to transport the stuff to other markets. The bus passengers were also forced to make other plans. Thank God, because as Doron scampered down the shallow bald hill, he knew he was going to feel almost safe when he reached the shadows of the long, empty, looming buses. The afternoon light gave him long patches of darkness to hide in, and he flitted from one shadow to the next, always looking up, watching for the choppers that were plying the sky now like swarms of intrusive insects. He tried to catch his breath.

Ping. What was that? Another ping and the sound of a crackle. He saw two black rips in the side of the bus, just a few feet from where he was standing. Someone was shooting at him. He looked up toward where the shots had come from and saw—quite far away at the edge of the wadi—a figure in khakis, looking lonely against the white sky, aiming. Another ping. Doron's heart started to race; he just couldn't believe it. He hesitated for a second between fleeing or calling to the fellow in Hebrew. What would he shout?
“Ani Israeli”?
He would never be believed.

Another shot exploded next to his ankle, and Doron fell to his knees and pulled himself under the bus as a hail of bullets ripped the air where he had been standing, chopping up the dirt beneath the bus's tires. He rolled to the other side of the bus and out from beneath it. He looked up at the slope of the wadi. Damn, he was almost across, really. Would the guy follow him? Doron doubted it. It depended how nutty and paranoid and
dedicated
the guy was. Would he be convinced that this poor Palestinian fuck trying to cross over was a mad terrorist intent on bombing the Knesset, or would he more likely think, Oh, fuck it—one more Palestinian visiting his ailing auntie in East Jerusalem, who gives a flying fuck? That would be the reaction of most of the men Doron had worked with, but then, there was always the possibility of the odd superpatriot taking up the scent. Then you were fucked.

He edged around the truck that was hiding him and looked up toward the spot where the soldier had stood, but the man was gone. Oh, he hoped and hoped again that the guy was not going to give chase on foot. He did not want to be hunted down by one of his own men. What if it were someone who would recognize him? It was unlikely, but they did sometimes put the same guy on duty over and over during these times. What if it was Zvili, for God's sake? But he knew it wasn't: Zvili never watched the wadi. I'm just going to make a run for it now, Doron thought. Not much more than a hundred meters, a good sprint. He was off, the ends of his scarf trailing behind him. The shots followed him up the side of the wadi like a furious animal. Fast, fast. He stumbled and clawed at the ground, and strained his way up the slope, racing against his heartbeat. He didn't look back until he reached the wadi's edge. The boy was standing there on the other side, his gun hanging down, watching Doron go.

And then he was across.

•  •  •

T
HIS DR. GEORGE
Raad was a very sick man, sick in the head, according to Mahmoud Sheukhi, who had been standing well back in the crowd, watching the proceedings. Mahmoud had one rule: No matter how shitty and stupid a fellow Palestinian was, you
never
criticized him in public where the Zionists might pick it up and use it against your people. Mahmoud despised the Authority, despised Ahmed Amr, too, now, but he would never say it out loud in a place where there were obviously television cameras.

And besides, Dr. Raad knew the damned name of the damned Israeli soldier who was responsible for the boy's death. He
knew.
She knew, too, Mahmoud was sure. So what was going on? Raad was attacking Palestinians, and at the same time protecting an Israeli soldier? It was unheard of, unprecedented, a terrible act of treason. Maybe tragedy had driven the two of them insane—it was the only explanation Mahmoud could think of.

It left Mahmoud in an awkward position. It seemed to him that he was definitely the only other Palestinian who knew Lieutenant Doron's name. The Raads weren't doing anything with this precious information. They were sitting on it as if they had the right to decide what was moral and immoral, as if only they had the right to judge. Just because it was their baby who died.

Raad took him for a fool, but Mahmoud Sheukhi was nobody's fool. Dr. George Raad with his American and British degrees and his long string of publications and all his endless pronouncements on the Palestinian question? Fuck him. He had forgotten what was right and what was wrong. What was acceptable and what was forbidden.

So it was up to Sheukhi. Sheukhi would see to it that the right thing got done.

H
E WAS AT THAT DEMONSTRATION,”
Reuven said slowly. “In Ramallah. Baby martyrs . . .” Reuven knew this would irk Yizhar. Reuven was pleased to know something his boss didn't. He looked up for the reaction.

“What? What? You mean yesterday?” Yizhar was nonplussed. His day had hardly begun, and already, this? He was leaning with one hand on his desk. He straightened abruptly, and looked at Reuven.

“How do you know?”

“I saw it on TV,” Reuven said.

“I watched it, I watched it,” said Yizhar. “I didn't see anything.”

“Well, he was there. Right down in front. I saw him. He was wearing some kind of outfit. But it was him, all right.”

“At the rally.” Yizhar dropped himself onto his chair and shook his head. He exhaled. “He's out of his fucking mind.” He shut his eyes. The boy could get himself seriously killed, and it would be—as far as the army was concerned—Yizhar's fault. Irit came in with the newspapers, and dropped them down on his desk. They landed with a clap. Yizhar opened his eyes, said “Coffee” to her back, picked up the papers, selected
Yediot,
and held it almost to his nose for examination. He was hiding, too. He didn't want Reuven to witness the depth of his dismay.

“Palestinians,” he said, reading through the report on the rally. “Leave them alone, they'll tear each other to shreds. Look at this,” he said, holding up the paper so he could shove a finger at one story and rattle the sheets. “They practically kidnapped the old man. Idiots. They almost managed to kill a man who's already half dead and a fucking symbol of their cause.”

Reuven shrugged.

Yediot
had more. All the Authority had to do, it seemed, was whisper the words
find the soldier,
and the melodrama would erupt all over again. Two hours after the rally ended, and in spite of the rumors of Hajimi's imminent release, two Israeli soldiers had been wounded, and four Palestinians had been killed and hundreds injured in a huge demonstration at the Ramallah checkpoint. An old woman who lived nearby died of a heart attack, which the Authority was also blaming on the Israelis, of course. If a Palestinian died anywhere in the world, somehow it was Israel's fault. In Ashkelon, Intelligence was still going over the pieces of metal they had collected from a bombing in Tel Aviv three days earlier.
Yediot
had a picture of the scraps sitting in a warehouse somewhere—Yizhar supposed it was Ashdod, but those kinds of facts were never released. The scraps looked like lost pieces of a huge old puzzle. Once, they fit in somewhere, the wall of a SuperPharm, a Super-Sol produce counter, a Bank Leumi teller's booth, Discount Bank, Best Buy. Now, they were a jumble of nothing. Yes, of course—Yizhar ran his finger down the column until he found the name—as usual, they were saying the bomber was a young man from Tzurif, from the Tzurif village Hamas cell. As far as Yizhar could tell, all suicide bombers came from the Tzurif village Hamas cell. We should just go in and raze the place, he thought. Trundle in with the bulldozers, and presto!, no more Tzurif, no more bombers. Simple. It's how we did it in 1948. “We will maintain the remaining property and return it to the owners when the time comes.”

Classic. “ . . . When the time comes.” That's what the army told the Arabs back in 1948, and that's what Yizhar would like to tell the families of Tzurif. (Of course, there was hardly any property remaining back then, and the Arabs also never got it back. The time was not coming.) Yizhar should be in charge, he thought to himself. He understood 1948. He knew it by heart from his grandfather who had been a road builder before the establishment of the state. In 1948, his grandfather had told him, a brave outnumbered fighting force was defending a valiant Jewish population from utter destruction by the vast arrayed armies of Arabia. They were defending the people of Israel—my people, Yizhar thought—who had come from everywhere in the world but especially from Europe, where every nation was bent on their destruction. His grandfather had fled pogroms in the Ukraine, he knew. We were an upright nation back in '48, Yizhar thought. Those were the days of real heroes, and the few Palestinians who were here in the land of David—and who were really Lebanese and Syrian and Jordanian—had to make way for the desperate Jews, it was an imperative of history. We used to call
ourselves
Palestinians, Yizhar remembered, because we lived in Palestine. In 1948, the Jewish triumph was complete, and it was morally sound.

But nowadays, the Israelis were weak and dispirited. They were modern. Put the village under closure, was all they could come up with. There were too many problems in this world. Without looking up, Yizhar reached out for his coffee mug, which had been placed in its usual spot. He took a long swallow. Sweet, the way he liked it.