Martyrs’ Crossing (4 page)

In the shadow of the watchtower, Marina sat down on the bench, squeezing between two elderly men in traditional robes. She set her bag down between their walking sticks. She wanted to check Ibrahim before she brought him over to the guardroom, see if she could get him to use the inhaler. Through the rain, the one small bulb in the checkpoint trailer sparkled like a star.

•  •  •

G
EORGE SET DOWN
his cup, and experimented with putting his left leg over his right, instead of his right over the left. It relieved the deadening somewhat, he thought. He regained a painful contact with his left foot. He sipped at his coffee, so unlike Marina's. Second set: Czech down two games to love. Hers was really good, boiled over charcoal on the grill, fragrant with cardamom and thick with sugar and the sediment of ground coffee. It was heavy with the taste of home. So Arab.
“Si arabe,”
as Ahmed would say breathily, laughing, imitating an old French flame of his who had been infatuated with the desert peoples. How had Marina become such an authentic Palestinian all of a sudden?

They had never drunk coffee like that while she was growing up in Cambridge. It must have been the husband's influence or the influence of geography. Or her new religion, George thought grimly. The Raads were secular Palestinian Christians; his daughter had made a conversion to Islam. The girl he remembered and the new religion did not seem to go together, but she had done it for love. Perhaps that explained it.

On this last trip to Ramallah, he and Marina had sat out on the roof and drunk her coffee together. She complained too much about the Israelis.

“They are so arrogant at the checkpoint,” she said. She poured more coffee. Ibrahim climbed down from her lap. “It's such a frustrating experience, every time.”

“It's meant to be. It's meant to teach you a lesson.”

George shook his head, remembering the conversation. The Israelis did stupid things, pointless things. What did Marina expect, fellowship, respect? They were a rude and thoughtless people, at best. We are enemies, she knew that. But she'd been worried that with the growing unrest, it might become more difficult to get through for an appointment at the hospital. She already needed medical documents, a doctor's note, et cetera.

George recalled how he'd tuned her out and had begun wondering about the solar panels on the neighbors' roofs. He couldn't listen long to Marina's analysis of The Cause because to him she seemed such a novice. Her observations—he could have made them at the age of eight, as he bounced into Jordan from Palestine, sitting on a suitcase in the backseat of Grandfather's motorcar.

From Marina's roof in Ramallah, he'd noticed an old, rusty bedspring on the Katuls' terrace next door. Katul was such a pleasant fellow, always smiling and whistling and offering to lend George his car. Katul was whistling over in the next yard, as he worked beneath his old Chevy. What was that song? Katul had something to do with Hamas fund-raising, George had heard. Oh, Hamas. George thought about it every time he heard Katul whistling. A bad and difficult organization, full of cold and rigid men, including his son-in-law. Not Katul, of course.

George remembered feeling that he was being inattentive to Marina, so he'd turned from his study of Katul's terrace, and watched his grandson's face. What an amazing face it was. The boy was bent over a pot full of dirt, digging for worms that were not there, and humming. Now George recognized the song that Katul was whistling as he worked under his car—it was the theme from
The Lion King.
“The cirrrrrrr-cle of life . . .” Ibrahim was humming along with Katul. George and his grandson had watched the movie the other day dubbed into Arabic.
That
was funny. In any case, what was George to do about Marina's problems with the Israelis? She was a big girl, now, and George was not the Israelis. He was not even the fucking Palestinians anymore, particularly. George began humming the
Lion King
song, too, and Ibrahim looked up, smiling. He was picking handfuls of flowers from the flowerpots on the roof. My ticket back, George thought, watching the boy.

The defending champion went down to a sudden and ignominious defeat—and at the hands of a Swede who only liked to hit from the backcourt. Too bad. George switched off the set. What now? It was almost time to go over to the hospital, check out his mail, begin his afternoon procedures. He finished off the cold coffee.

George did not want to think of Marina alone in depressing Ramallah in that apartment with Ibrahim while the father did his hunger strikes and made his protests and conspired with his cellmates and wasted time. She had returned to a place that was not the Palestine George had dreamed of regaining, not the place he'd told her about ever since she could understand. The new Palestine was a place totally unlike that—it was a new world, changed utterly since George and the rest of them had been forced to flee. The Catastrophe, the Palestinians called it, appropriately enough. Forever after, George had felt homeless—unlike most people, when he traveled he did not have a home to go home to. He wasn't a refugee anymore, exactly, but he considered himself one. The worst part was that he never experienced his dislocation more acutely than when he was back in Palestine among the unhappy Palestinians who were surviving the Israeli occupation with a fixed ironic grin or eternal defiance.

He'd made Sandra into his home, and she was gone.

It was a strange life their daughter had chosen, and probably George's fault. It was another reproach, he was sure. Marina had gone “home.”

You make Palestine romantic, Sandra had told him. It's not romantic.

•  •  •

I
N MIDWINTER,
Cambridge was covered in snow. The trees that lined Boylston Street looked heavy and tired, wrapped in white, like shrouds. George was beginning to feel his old, hard resentment of America: the cold, unpleasant climate, the long, long winter. Marina liked to ski, he remembered.

“It's almost time, Doctor,” Philip said to him from the doorway. Why did Philip always have to sound so young? Six months after Sandra died, it turned out that Philip's lease for his place on Comm Ave had run out and he was looking for a new spot. So George put him up in their basement apartment. Philip was his protégé, a doctoral candidate in the Middle Eastern Studies department at Harvard, and a Palestinian from Beit Jala near Bethlehem. He had always been around, seeking advice or information, having dinner with them or coffee with George. And now George needed companionship to keep him from depression. Now Philip was his assistant. Spirited, faithful, kind. Hardworking, intelligent, learned. Just the sort of thing the doctor ordered, George thought glumly.

“I'm going, I'm going,” George said. Wisp of a boy, the phrase kept going through his mind. He pulled himself up and adjusted his robe. Yes, okay, sure, it was just a flannel bathrobe, a dressing gown—as he used to say before he came to America where the names of things were less euphemistic—but somehow the adjustment, the rewrap, the pulling at the sash, made him feel more kingly, more distant.

He started slowly up the stairs. He felt his face. Gray whiskers growing. He stood barefoot on the planks of the dark upstairs landing, feeling around on the wall for the thermostat—ha! there it was. He turned up the heat.

George made his way down the hall, flicking on the lights as he went. He wondered what made him so angry with Ahmed and the Authority. Was it the stupidity of it all, and how this group of thieves thought they represented a “people”? No, it was also the self-congratulatory tone Ahmed always adopted, and the way things were decided these days, how the Chairman—and his sycophants and flunkies—scraped away all the profits and made deals with the Israelis to enjoy the eventual spoils.

Ah, well, and why should the people get anything? They never had and never would. Never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. You couldn't put your fate into the Chairman's hands, or Ahmed's hands, and expect to come out of it unscathed. It infuriated him, and yet he could never quite abandon Ahmed, friend of his childhood.
Sadiq at-tufoulah:
it was a classic Arabic formulation. George rinsed the razor and slapped at his face with a cold washcloth. Those connections were impossible to overlook, especially when one had so little else from the past to hold on to. Look how he had clung to his easy chair.

He came downstairs into the front hallway and put on his coat, his fur hat, his scarf, and his gloves. He stepped out onto the stoop. The light this afternoon looked like a winter dawn, gray and dismal. The snow on the ground was not new, and it was caked black along the curbs. He could see the spots where the neighborhood's dogs had been pissing on his tires. His car had not been moved since before the snow.

Ah, he thought, feeling himself hesitate before unlocking the car door. George's wrist would not turn: he was having a terror episode. Calm yourself, he thought, using Grandfather's strict, military voice. George had started having this problem after Najjar got shot in the knees three months earlier, in London. There were rogue elements, Najjar had told him on the phone. Najjar was something like him, a Palestinian writer who objected to the way the peace was being concluded—but Najjar was a poet and had worse enemies, apparently. And an ominous, paranoid turn of mind that had turned out to be prescient. A few days after Najjar was shot, Ahmed had rung George from Jericho to warn him that, as Ahmed had said portentously, “threats were being made.”

By whom, George had asked. Against whom?

Don't ask, Ahmed had said. Just be careful.

George didn't believe Ahmed. It didn't make sense. He was pretty sure that you didn't blow up people these days because of what they wrote. Probably, the warnings were just one method the Authority was using now to quiet annoying dissent. But then, look at Najjar. It was bound to make you think.

George tried to control these episodes. Especially since he had had his little coronary problem, he rejected them as redundant worrying. But Najjar's knees and Ahmed's call had forced him to contemplate the renewed volatility of the situation. As a writer who frequently expressed opinions that were at odds with someone or other's—you could count on
that
in Palestine—he was a visible and quite stationary target. And here was his car, bearing his license plate, at his address, in front of his house, which was listed in the Peter Bent's hospital directory, which was public. George stepped back from the car. It seemed untouched. There were no footprints in the snow except his own. And the dogs', of course. He hoped that one could still assume the dogs were innocent.

Well, then. Onward. He bent toward the car and clicked the key in the lock. No explosion. Utter quiet reigned as usual on the quiet boulevards of Cambridge. He straightened and rewound his scarf before lowering himself into the driver's seat. Of course, he had not forgotten that another method was to have the thing detonate upon ignition. He steeled himself. Is it a phobia if it stems from a factual menace? And
was
this menace factual?

“A phobia is irrational,” he said out loud.

He had had the opportunity of hearing in some detail how Semtex works, with the explosive's chemistry explained by people who knew. He knew how fast it was, how powerful, how undetectable. Like the pilot knowing how many thousands of bolts, switches, bearings, and meters could fail during takeoff. You just had to forget about it. That was real courage.

“A phobia is irrational,” he said again. He heard a noise. A dull thud. He trusted it was not his heart. Someone was rapping on the car's window. It was Philip. George gave him a small wave. Philip gestured at him to lower the window. But he could not do that without turning the key in the ignition. If by some chance, someone had—God, it was ridiculous—planted something, poor faithful Philip would be killed along with Dr. George, the intended victim.

The thought cheered George, somehow. But shit, he was becoming morbid. He turned the key. A little cough, the sound of the motor revving, and otherwise, a resounding silence.

He lowered the passenger window.

“You're still here?” Philip said.

“Apparently,” George answered.

“You're going to be late.”

“I expect so.”

Philip smiled. “Anyway, you started the car, and it didn't explode,” he said. “And it actually seems to be running. So you're a lucky man.”

Philip was surprisingly not stupid. George watched him clump away in his tremendous galoshes. Only a foreigner would wear those things in America, he thought. Philip was a skinny Palestinian twig, and it looked as if his big rubber boots were holding him to the ground. George watched the boy weave down the street. He put the car into gear and felt the tires spin for a second, spraying snow and slush, before they engaged with the asphalt.

•  •  •

M
ARINA WAS SOAKED
through. She'd taken a seat on the bench when the storm erupted and some one made space for her. She'd been up and down, now, shouting at the soldiers, begging to get through, and then sitting again, quiet, comforting Ibrahim and trying to get him to take his inhaler. When the rain started in earnest, she pulled him under the jacket that the man in the worn suit had given her, tucked there along with all the medical documents, and sat forlornly under an umbrella—also provided by her protector—while the man went and yelled some more at the Israelis. He was the same man who had given her his handkerchief.

“Why can't you take this woman inside the guardroom?” the man was shouting from the doorway.

Doron looked at the man. He hated this pushy Palestinian, had come to hate him during the past half hour, as he wrestled with headquarters about an older man who said he needed dialysis, always receiving a negative response, and argued with Zvili, and checked the private's bloody eye, and watched the rain begin, with the man's spluttering always going on in the background. Doron was actively considering civilian life. Set up a little business, get married, live in the suburbs.