Martyrs’ Crossing (32 page)

“I don't understand you, Lieutenant, truly I don't. Sit down. Why are you here?”

“Zvili said you wanted to see me.”

“I've seen enough of you already today. On a tape from Channel Two. At that rally in Ramallah.”

Doron looked down at the floor.

“So?” he said.

“So? You were there.” Yizhar looked at Doron. In the half-light, he caught the knobby outline of the scarf that was wrapped loosely around the soldier's neck. Did he wear this outfit all the time, now? The rope to hang yourself—the phrase passed fleetingly through Yizhar's mind.

“It's a violation of our agreement,” Yizhar said. “You're ready to go there again, aren't you? You look foolish.”

Doron looked away from the wall he'd been staring at and focused on Yizhar's silhouette against the patch of moonlit sky in the window. Backlit, the brush of the officer's hair stood out from his head like the blade of a hatchet.

Doron was exhausted. He'd spent almost all the previous night wandering around the Old City, disoriented and jangling from his scramble through the wadi. Near dawn, he'd taken a bus over to his mother's and slept for a few hours. The house had been empty. His mother was down in the Negev overnight, teaching at the university. When Doron awoke, he had rummaged through his closet until he found his blue-jean jacket, removed the empty cigarette pack and stuck it in his pants pocket. If he could only get access to a military phone and call the secure number he'd copied down that night, he thought he had a good chance of finding the man who had given him his orders. For what it was worth.

Yizhar walked around the office, moving things in the dark, straightening them, putting papers into piles, kicking the side of the
Jane's Defence
stack.

“Marina Raad is quite pretty, by the way,” Yizhar said, looking up at Doron. Even in the shadows, he could see the soldier react. A slight step back, tension in the shoulders, as if he were getting ready to take a blow.

“You think?” asked Doron after a second.

The soldier's shadowy features were unreadable.

“So, are we enemies now?” Doron asked.

“I sincerely hope not,” said Yizhar. “That would be very bad for you.”

“What do you want?”

“To talk to you, and have you listen.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. And then, to have you do as I say.”

Doron sat on a hard chair in front of Yizhar's desk. “It sounds as if your plan hasn't changed much since we last spoke,” he said. The moon shone down in patches, touching his shoulders and his hair and brow and the angles of his face with white light. What Yizhar could see of him looked like an ancient stone head of a boy, floating in midair. His eyes were huge and dark. Who was this boy, this man, now? What was he capable of? The roar down the hall was growing louder.

“Why should the plan change?” Yizhar asked.

Doron just looked at him.

“This is my thinking,” Yizhar said to him. Doron gazed out the window at the winged lion. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir.” Doron nodded his head curtly.

“We have a problem. The first problem is this: They want you. The second problem is this: You don't know what you want. Except you want to be a hero. Fine.”

“I don't want to be a hero.”

“Good.”

Yizhar sat down at the edge of his desk. He fiddled in the dark with his tape recorder.

“Do you want me to be a hero?” Doron asked.

Yizhar looked up from his fiddling. “I despise heroes.”

“Ah. He despises heroes.”

“Heroes act, and other people suffer. I hate that.”

“You have a very dark view of things,” Doron said.

“Everything I am, I became in the army. I'm just an army boy,” Yizhar said. “That's what you were supposed to be, too. Before you became a Palestinian.”

Doron began to rise from his chair.

Yizhar stood quickly, and came forward and pushed him back down, a light push, gentle, on his breastbone. Doron sat down. Yizhar could hear the man's breath. It was quick and shallow.

“I'm through talking to you,” Doron said in a fierce whisper.

“Oh, no. Wrong. We have lots to talk about,
habibi,
” Yizhar said. Now he would use that word with Doron. Its familiarity would humiliate the boy, or at least, he would understand that there was an implied condescension.

Yizhar shut the door on the faint light of the hallway, and the room turned a deep blue. Doron could hear Yizhar's voice but could only see his outline as he paced. “Listen: I don't like the bullshit, okay? You talk to those people, you're court-martialed, do you understand? Court-martialed in a secret proceeding. You're finished. Second: Hajimi is going to be released, and very soon. I worked hard for this release, but trust me, you don't want to be standing around Ramallah like some fool in costume when he comes out.

“Satisfy my curiosity, okay?” Yizhar said. “This is what I'm curious about—and let's put it starkly: Are you a patriot or are you a traitor? Let's find out, okay?”

“What's the test, Colonel?”

“This is the test: Tomorrow afternoon, at one o'clock, I've set up a session for you at Army Radio and you are going to go over there and you are going to have a little give-and-take with my friend Avram Shell. A chat, we call it. Sort of impromptu.”

Yizhar leaned over his desk and picked up a few pieces of paper from beneath a paperweight that had a blue Star of David embedded in it. He waved the paper at Doron. The white sheets flapped in the moonlight like the wings of an exhausted bird.

Over the architecture of the objects on the desk, Doron looked at the strange dark figure opposite him. Yizhar's face hovered there, and he stuck out his hand with the few sheets of paper in it, and the paper seemed to float above the blue star, above the shadows of two telephones, and above the open cell phone that was lying there open on its back, like a dog waiting to have its stomach scratched.

Doron took the paper.

“I've been working on it all day,” Yizhar said. “It's very simple, short. It's perfect. It's true. Avram will ask his questions, and you will give answers that are a lot like the ones you see there. It will spare the country terrible stress and embarrassment. It will save your skin and your career.”

“Sounds like a miracle,” Doron said. “Let me look.”

“Remember, we need this,” Yizhar said. “I need to hear it. The Israeli people need to hear it. Most of all, the Palestinians at the checkpoints need to hear it. If you weren't the one who was the commanding officer that night, and if you weren't acting the way you've been acting, I might not ask you to put on this performance. But as things stand now, I've lost my confidence. We need to hear your voice.”

Doron held the interview in his hand.

“Do you mind turning on the lights?” he asked.

Yizhar stood and turned on his desk light. The vacuum cleaner was fading away down the corridor. Doron read. Then he went back to the beginning, and read again.

Finally, he looked up at Yizhar. Lit from below, Yizhar's face had taken on an otherworldly pallor. His nostrils glowed, his earlobes shone, the slight dimple in his chin turned shadowy and mysterious. Above it all, his eyes kept watch. Doron shook his head almost imperceptibly, to himself. Yizhar picked up on it immediately.

“You can't say no,” Yizhar said. “Don't even try.”

“I can,” said Doron. “I do. I won't lie. I will not say it was a ten-minute wait. I will not say the boy was not in trouble. I will not say I went by the book, and I won't lie about that phone call.”

“It's not a lie.
You
are not remembering correctly.
You
were exhausted, as it says there.
You
did the best you could. Poor boy. Now, the enemies of Israel are trying to use you to injure Israel and her army. But
you
will
not
be a party to their manipulations. You know that the responsibility for the checkpoint that night was entirely yours. Am I right, by the way? Entirely yours, and thus any blame is also entirely yours. Correct?”

Doron said nothing. He folded the sheets of paper carefully. He put the thing in the pocket of his sweater vest.

Yizhar turned off the desk lamp, and seemed to disappear. His voice went on, out of thin air. It was piercing into Doron's brain. Doron felt his fatigue kick in. As Doron's eyes again became accustomed to the gloom, Yizhar's shadow slowly gathered itself before him once more.

“You can't go on taking their side against us, Ari. In your mind, okay, maybe, but on the ground, impossible. We need to establish our
facts
—that's what you do in a case like this. Just because their kid died doesn't make them good or honest. They're not good. They're not honest. The Raads and Hajimis are terrorists and propagandists. They are the lowest of the Arabs, vile Jew-haters. I'm not protecting anyone but you, and I'm protecting you from
them.
Nothing will happen to the boy's family because you and Avram have this little chat. They'll go on being what they are. But
you
will have spared your country an ordeal. I appeal to your patriotism, truly.” Yizhar realized as he spoke that he more or less meant what he was saying.
That
felt good—strange, but good. “If you involve the army in some kind of scandal over this relatively minor incident, you will be playing into the hands of the enemies of the Jewish people.”

“I am not going to involve the army in any scandal. The army has nothing to do with it,” said Doron. “By now.”

“Nothing to do with it? You
are
crazy. Anything you do now reflects on the army. You're the target, the bad guy, the guilty party. God, if the Authority finds you in Ramallah, if Hajimi finds you on his turf, hanging out, I don't know what will happen. You see? You involve us, but you don't consult us. How can we protect you and ourselves?” Yizhar looked at Doron as if he were a specimen from a primitive culture.

“I will not go on the radio and tell lies,” Doron said.

“We need you to get out there and say this, or something like it. We need
you
to tell Israelis that we did the right thing. And we want the Palestinians to hear it, too. To hear from us that there wasn't an hour wait for this boy, as their people are claiming, to hear that you take full responsibility for your actions that night.”

“I won't do it.”

Yizhar stood there, tapping a foot, thinking about court-martials. He wondered what he would have to say to get the chiefs of staff to go along. Ah, it would be nice to have Ari Doron under lock and key for a few weeks or months. Yizhar could tell his colleagues that the man was deranged, and, as evidence, show the tape of Doron in Ramallah. The outfit itself was enough to get an Israeli institutionalized.

“Well?” Doron was waiting.

“I'm not sure I see an alternative.”

“How about this game plan, Colonel? I don't say anything, you don't say anything, and we let the whole thing die down.”

“Yeah.” Yizhar sat down again. “Yeah. That would be good.” He was silent for a minute. The shuffling shouting sound of the nighttime crowd below poured in through the window. “In fact, that would be the normal thing, the thing I myself would advise. I would advise it, that is, if I hadn't just seen you parading around at a rally organized—I mean, really, targeted—against
you.
If I didn't think that, in some way, you were a dangerous lunatic and a very very loose fucking cannon. You are playing into their hands, no question. The Authority is not going to let this thing ‘die down' if they can figure out a way to keep it alive. You're helping them, and if you help them, you will lose our backing. And then, you will be utterly at their mercy.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it means. We will withdraw our protection from you.”

“Protection?”

“Our physical protection. You may not have noticed, but we've been following you with a small security detail.” Maybe
that
would put the fear of God into the soldier.

“Right,” Doron said. He felt in his pocket for the pack with the number on it. It was his insurance against Yizhar. Doron had devised his own little test for the colonel, and he didn't want to give it away.

Doron seemed bigger to Yizhar in some way since their last meeting, taller, more powerful. Maybe it was the darkness. Yizhar remained quiet. He wondered if he should be just the smallest bit nervous. And yet, he was an old hand. Did Doron think Yizhar didn't know how to do this? West Bank security: it meant interrogation first of all. Yizhar had been a master not just of the physical techniques—the humiliation of the little chair, the electric “stimuli,” the shaking methods, deprivations of every kind; all legal, by the way—but especially of the psychological aspects. And the miracle was, it worked with everyone! Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, the PFLP, the Intifada kids, petty street criminals. All human beasts. They all crumbled and talked and obeyed and collaborated, with the rare exceptional case, like Hajimi. And then they were okay after it. Yizhar didn't have to feel bad. He was a
nice
interrogator. He was gentle, not like some of the other guys. There were no lasting bumps, no visible bruises. No maiming. He would never do anything like that, not even to a terrorist. No. Just a little lesson.

He was a stylish interrogator, and his methods would work on Israelis, too, he imagined. Let's see.

“You're my favorite soldier, Ari.” Yizhar let the statement sit there.

Doron said nothing.

“You know why? Know why I like you so much? Because you're different. Because you
care.
”

“Fuck you.”

“No, I mean it.”