Martyrs’ Crossing (33 page)

“So do I.”

“Just listen,” Yizhar said. “I care, too. The thing is, right now, we think we care about different things. You care about the family of this boy who died, and I care about Israel. Right?” The boy was bound to assert his patriotism.

“I care about the country, too,” Doron said.

“Oh. Well, that's good,” said Yizhar. “I thought maybe you didn't feel that anymore.”

“I care, but maybe I care in a different way.”

“You want it to be a
good
country, right?”

“Don't try to make me sound naive.”

“I don't need to,” Yizhar said.

“I shouldn't have come here tonight,” Doron said.

“You came because you know instinctively that I will help you,” Yizhar said. “Why don't you believe me?”

“Because we have a fundamental disagreement.”

“Can you tell me what it is?” Yizhar asked.

“You believe nothing bad happened; I believe we killed a baby.”

Yizhar stopped on that. He leaned over and shoved his face close up to Doron's.

“We?” he whispered. “We?”

Doron pulled his head back. He looked at Yizhar, the blade of hair, the sharp brow that hid those eyes lying in wait. He was like some great bird of prey, crouching over Doron.

“We, the State of Israel,” Doron said.

“Oh,” said Yizhar. “We killed a baby.”

He said it without emotion, as if he were weighing the statement. “No. No, I don't think so, Ari. We've been over this. A child is dead, is how I would say it.”

“I'm tired of this,” Doron said. “You can't do this kind of thing and not take responsibility.” He stood, and Yizhar noticed how the soldier towered over him. A head taller, at least, my God! But Yizhar never lost his nerve. A man's courage is everything, Gertler had said.

“Where do you think you're going, Lieutenant?” Yizhar asked. “Ramallah?”

“I'll go where I want to,” Doron said.

“You'll go to Shell,” Yizhar said. “You'll go to the studio tomorrow at one. I don't like to be so crude, but it's an order, Lieutenant.”

Doron walked over to Yizhar and stuck his head down so the he was looking right into Yizhar's eyes. It was too dark to see much of anything so close up.

“Your orders don't mean much to me at this point,” Doron said. “Not compared to what I think I have to do.”

The two men were standing so close together they could have been dancing.

Yizhar stood there, thinking: What next. He thought he heard a noise, then, a noise that was not his panting, not the soldier's breathing, not his own heart.

His office door flew open.

No, Yizhar thought. What? What? He could feel Doron reacting to the sound, his interest failing, attention diverted.

A roar blasted into the room. Blazingly, the lights went on.

Doron wheeled around. In the doorway stood a squarish woman with a babushka tied around her head and the neck of a vacuum cleaner in her hand. Yizhar felt relief flood through him, followed by a wave of hilarity. In her other hand she carried a black garbage bag.

“Oh, God, to excuse me, please, gentlemen. I did not know that anyone was here.” Her face was flushed. She put the garbage bag down. “Lights were not on, you see. I am not paying attention.” What must she think, Yizhar wondered. A homosexual assignation? They had been standing so close to each other, in the dark, and now both looked so taken aback.

“That's all right,” Yizhar said. Finally I know why this hideous creature whom I have always loathed and avoided was put on God's earth, he thought. Fate gathered its strength, the East spewed forth its refugees, and then, suddenly, here she was, Mother Russia, at the door in Jerusalem, with a garbage bag, rescuing me from who knew what fate. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Kremlin. “We were just finishing up.” God is good.

“So I am to be cleaning, Mister? Or what?”

“You go right ahead,” said Yizhar.

•  •  •

D
ORON PUSHED PAST
the Russian lady and out the door. He barreled toward the stairway, with Yizhar at his heels. One flight, another, Yizhar always pursuing, until Doron arrived at the side door, a few floors ahead of Yizhar. He could hear the other man's footsteps coming down the stairway above. Doron breathed deeply. He twisted the door handle. It did not move in his hand. Next to it, a red light blinked. He blinked back at it, realizing what it meant. He breathed slowly again, trying to collect himself. The look on the cleaning woman's face. Unexpectedly, he wanted to laugh, but in a second, Yizhar would be there with him. Footsteps clacked down the stairway, some distance above. Doron put his head down and balled his fists into his vest pockets. He felt something there, and pulled out a piece of paper.

Right, the interview Yizhar had scripted for him, the smooth paper folded neatly. He replaced it. He scuffed at the floor. He was waiting for Yizhar, even though the guy had just threatened to court-martial him. It occurred to Doron that this was how he was spending most of his time these days. Waiting for Yizhar to decide, dispense, mete out his fate. That was over. Doron was waiting for Yizhar for the last time, waiting for him to open the door and let Doron out into the world to do whatever he was going to do. The footsteps came to a dead halt behind him. Doron turned and faced his pursuer. Humiliating to try a jailbreak only to end up back in the hands of the warden.

Yizhar looked at him and gave him one of those small smiles, like the one that Doron had seen frozen on his face the first time they met.

“Let me open it for you,” Yizhar said, with hyperpoliteness, almost as if he had swept his arm out before him and said, “After you.”

Doron waited for him to open the door.

“I'll be listening tomorrow,” Yizhar said as he turned one key, then another, in the door.

“You can listen,” said Doron.

“Be there.” Yizhar's index fingered hovered in the air in front of the computer pad. He looked at Doron. “By the way, we think they know who you are. We think Hajimi knows.”

Doron gave him a small smile of his own. But the news jolted him. Should he believe it? His legs weakened for a few seconds as he went out the door.

The dark city opened up before Doron as he moved into the night from the clammy confines of The Building. The enormous black sky. He closed his eyes and thought of the cleaning lady: someday he would go back into The Building and take her in his arms and kiss her right on the lips, adorable thing. The sweet chunk of moon hung like a piece of candy in the heavens. Something was cooking over charcoal—a piece of juicy meat being prepared somewhere for a late-night snack, with a smell that made his stomach cramp with hunger. Across the street, parking meters stood in rows, and the traffic light changed and changed back and changed again in a comforting automatic succession of stops and goes. Rooftops and antennae, domes, steeples, and lit-up signs, alleys that ran off in twisting blocks into darkness, cats crouching with stiff tails—all of this was here, outside, waiting for him.

He heard the door clank satisfyingly shut behind him, with a metallic, prisonlike slam. Turning, Doron surveyed The Building's exterior to make sure Yizhar had not followed him out. He couldn't have withstood any more talk with the night creature. Out here, it felt like freedom, although he knew that that was illusory. For the moment, shadows hid him. He noticed a car double-parked down the block, its engine idling. Was this his security detail? If there was one, which Doron doubted. It was probably just Yizhar's wife, waiting for him to come down. If Yizhar had one, which Doron doubted.

Yizhar only came out after sunset, Doron was beginning to think. Yizhar could see in the dark! He remembered that Yizhar had been linked to Gertler's wartime disgrace in some unknown way, and it didn't surprise him. The man was capable of any stinking trick. Doron leaned against a parking meter near his car. He was exhausted. He'd come near to strangling the man, and put himself at great risk, he was certain of it. Yizhar was always armed. He was not a military man for nothing.

He knew that before it was all over, he would regret not having ripped the creature's head off. Kill it before it kills you. He was beginning to wonder whether, beneath his khaki uniform, Yizhar concealed a pair of shiny black wings like a crow's. After Doron broke his scrawny neck, the wings would spread out across the pavement, broken, with blood and bone, and pink and gray sinew, and feathers splashed everywhere.

M
ARINA TRIED TO REMEMBER BACK
to the days when she was an intelligent person who could think logically. It seemed a long, long time ago. When Uncle Ahmed's men had started driving them away from the rally in Ramallah, she thought, dramatically, that she and her father were finished. They had gotten in the way of the Authority, and Uncle Ahmed, when riled, was ten times more hotheaded and dangerous than the Chairman, whose greatest virtue—and greatest flaw—was his wariness, and his caution. When her father had fainted, sitting in the big black car between those sweaty men in suits, Marina was certain he was going to die, and right there, and she would be all alone with those frightening serious men in the dark car, speeding somewhere up into the empty unlit hills. Her heart raced and pounded as she tried to revive her father while remaining proud and aloof, not an easy assignment. The panic felt familiar. The grotesque bodyguards would dump her father by the roadside and take her away where no one could find her.

Instead, the escort service sped Marina and George over to the Friends Clinic in Ramallah. Uncle Ahmed didn't want dead Dr. Raad on his hands, thanks, no matter how badly George had behaved. Ahmed would have had his thugs punished if they had let her father die, Marina realized later. Ahmed could be vengeful, she had heard, but he was not stupid. At the clinic, she sat in the bright waiting room with other women. A group of old men in drooping gray robes smoked cigarettes in a corner. Sick babies sat politely on their mothers' laps, waiting to be seen. She wondered what would have happened if she'd come here the other night. Probably they too would have sent her to Hadassah.

Right now, her father was in the living room, resting on the couch, with Philip watching over him. He had recovered quite nicely. In a matter of minutes after coming to himself at the clinic, he began berating nurses, correcting doctors, complaining to her, asking for Philip, and demanding to be taken home. Hospitals make you sicker, he pointed out to the doctors. The doctors told Marina and Philip that a combination of exhaustion and palpitations exacerbated by chronic coronary weakness had caused Dr. Raad to black out. They told them that he needed to be examined soon by a specialist, to see how the heart was functioning, as they put it. It had been a month since his last electrocardiogram. He should go to Hadassah, they implied. George knew it all already, of course. After their consultation, Philip and Marina went into George's room, where, propped up against his white pillowcases, with a copy of
Al-Quds
open across the knobs and bumps of his covered legs, and his glasses pulled way down to the bottom of his nose, he told them exactly what the doctors had just told them, and then said, “Now, get me out of here.” When they heard his petition, his doctors nodded and smiled and released Dr. Raad because he asked to be released, and because he was George Raad, eminent cardiologist and political commentator. He was weak, they warned Marina.

The episode scared her, and pushed the rally and Ari Doron straight out of her thoughts. Until now. She whisked lemon juice, garlic, hot pepper, and spices together. She was preparing the
iftar
meal—during Ramadan, the evening meal that breaks the long day's fast. She never thought about cooking, even during Ramadan, when meals took on a painful importance. Cooking was just something she did automatically. Like her mother. She chopped up a couple of chickens and threw them into the bowl with everything else. She turned on the oven, which was not so easy: you had to fiddle with so many knobs. For some reason, the timer always had to be on or the gas would not ignite. Cooking was the only thing in the Middle East that had to be timed. Her father said it was because food was the only thing Arabs profoundly cared about. But Marina pointed out that although the timer had to be on for the oven to light, you could set it for 20 minutes if you liked, and then cook for half a day, and the dial would just sit there at 20 and never move. The alarm would never go off.

“Well, that about sums things up, don't you think?” her father said.

It was a gross violation of everything decent for that soldier to appear at the rally, Marina was thinking. To stick his nose up there, in the front of the crowd. Attending a rally for his own victim: it was too insolent. Parading like that, to make sure she'd see him. A person who would do such a thing, you couldn't know what was going on in his mind. Did he think she forgave him? She hoped not, because she didn't. She couldn't. She was not about to forgive anyone involved, not herself and especially not him. When I forgive myself, then I'll begin to start thinking about forgiving you, Lieutenant. And I will never forgive myself. So don't come near me again. Don't do it. I don't grant absolution. I don't spare evildoers. I was about to tell Uncle Ahmed you were there. Yes, I was. That would have changed the mood of the crowd, wouldn't it? I just didn't have a chance, didn't have time. What saved you wasn't my kindness or my forgiveness. Don't imagine it. What saved you was my father's desperate rush to get his hands on the microphone, and the uproar after.