Martyrs’ Crossing (40 page)

They entered what used to be the dining room and study. In the corner, dusting the top of a television, was a woman about George's age.

“Mom, we have visitors,” the girl said to the woman in Hebrew.

The woman turned.

George saw a face he would never have recognized anywhere else in the world, but here he recognized it. It was the little girl who lived in back, in the cramped renters' apartment on the first floor. She came from a family of very poor Arabic-speaking Jews from Beirut. He recalled that he and she had once run away from home together and hidden behind a bush in the Rose Garden park a block away until George's mother found them. Leila was her name. She stood there looking at him intently over her reading glasses.

“
Kif halak,
George,” she said. He saw that there were sudden tears in her eyes.

He looked at her, and smiled politely, and shook his head. He couldn't respond to her quick emotion.

She couldn't take her eyes off him, and he shifted under her intense gaze.

“I am so sorry about your grandson,” she said finally, in what sounded like little-used Arabic.

He kept standing there.

“Do you think we could have a glass of water for Dr. Raad?” Philip asked, after a silence.

“Oh, my God, yes,” the girl said, running off.

“Sit down, please,” Leila said.

The chair she gestured to was the twin of the chair that sat in front of George's television in Cambridge.

He felt his heart squeezing inside his chest. He shook his head.

“I can't,” he said. I want to oblige you, he thought, but I can't. I don't want to make any trouble, but I must. After all, he couldn't very well sit in that chair. Someone was in it already. His mother was there, crossing and uncrossing her legs, making her nylons whisper as she talked to him about school and his maths test and the tennis team. He was a little boy in shorts, sitting, almost lost, in the enormous cushions of the other chair.

“Please,” Leila said.

He stared at the chair. She looked at it. He could tell that she hadn't thought about it in twenty years or more, if ever. But she remembered. He heard her take a breath.

“Sit here, then,” she said, pointing to the couch.

He walked over stiffly, and sat down. Philip hovered over him.

“I wondered if you would come,” Leila said. “I saw you on the television.”

The girl brought a glass of water.

It was his mother's dining room table, he could see that now, from the couch. He took a sip of the water.

“Shukran,”
he said to Leila.

“Oh, George,” she said.

She was trying to be matter-of-fact, because she was Israeli, and that was a habit with them. But she couldn't quite manage it, he noticed.

He tried, too, because it was his habit to be diffident and removed, but what he could not do a second time in this place was distance himself.

•  •  •

T
HE BOY AWOKE
to a loud burst of masculine laughter. George's bedroom was adjacent to the dining room and he padded out in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes. There they all were, all the men, in their robes, sitting around the table near the wood-burning stove, hunched over, drinking yet another enormous pot of tea. His father lifted him up and sat him on the table where he remained like a treasured centerpiece for what seemed hours, in memory, incorrectly answering questions about the price of oranges and loquats to pleased laughter from the men, and doing sums concerning the weight of boxes and crates with the seriousness of utter ignorance. The men brought him sweets from Habb Rumman, or sometimes creamy Istanbuli cheese from Zapheriades' grocery. He remembered his father kissing him over and over on the top of his head. It seemed a tableau from another century.

•  •  •

“Y
OU LOOK WELL,”
Leila said in English.

“But changed, eh?” George said. “After all these years . . .”

“Well, we have all changed.” She looked down at her mottled hands and looked back up at him.

“Yup,” he said. His eyes moved around the room. He didn't want to make Leila and her daughter miserable by being here and seeing all that was here to see, but what choice did he have? He couldn't shift his view without noticing something else Leila would recognize as belonging to him. Every wall, every square of tile, for example. He felt he was hallucinating.

“How is America?” Leila asked. The daughter sat down in the easy chair.

“Big,” he said. “American.” What should he ask her in return? He was having trouble with the norms of politesse, which did not seem to fit the situation.

“This is your daughter?” he asked, groping for a subject.

“Oh, yes,” Leila said, flustered that she had not introduced them. “This is Noga.”

“Hello, Noga,” George said. Somehow, the girl was easier. She was new, and not so easily associated with history. She had no memory of those days, that chair. It was hers, as far as she knew.

“Hi,” she said, shyly. She was younger than Marina by about ten years, he figured.

“Do you have any others?” George asked Leila.

There was a small but noticeable silence.

“I had a son,” she said. She looked away toward the terrace. “He was killed last year in Lebanon.”

George found himself speechless, when words of condolence should have popped to his lips. You have to pay
some
price for taking away
my
land and living in
my
house for fifty years and for eternity, he heard himself think. He looked at Leila for too long a time, and he knew she could feel him looking. He knew that she knew what he was thinking. She probably had her own bitter, blaming thoughts about
him,
too.

But this is my childhood acquaintance, he told himself, still looking at her and sizing up in her profile all the puffs and hollows, the lines and droops that age had wrought on the little girl's hopeful face. Like my loss, hers is a human loss also, a real true loss to her, and to this girl Noga. Oh, yes, he thought, he had learned a lesson from Ibrahim's death. You had to pick carefully the things in the name of which you were willing to let people die, and then you had to be certain that that was what they were dying for, and not for your own ambition, or someone else's, or for a plan that looked like the good plan but that actually was something else completely.

The Israelis had told her her boy had died for the Jews and that was almost as big a lie as the Palestinians' trying to convince him that
his
had died for the Palestinians. Only a monster would fail to recognize the parallel, or someone who was shielding his eyes from a distasteful truth, and George was bent on resisting everything that generated blindness and monstrousness. He had not become, overnight—over one particular night—some kind of mush-headed humanist, but he was trying hard to keep in mind the value of what was human, the value of each person's own short-lived story. He was refusing, deliberately, to deny human empathy, no matter between whom. Deny human empathy and go down as a villain, he believed.

It was always wrong for the young to die before their elders, he thought: young soldiers were a clever tool invented by the middle-aged and the elderly to ensure their own continuing comfort. Young martyrs, too. If someone had to die for the cause of Palestine—and history had certainly shown that
someone
did—why not George or Ahmed or even Hassan, why not Leila or the Prime Minister? Instead, his grandson was dead, her son was dead. Maybe in some vast eternal balance, her son deserved to be dead more than his grandson did—to pay back for the house, all the houses, the orchards, the vineyards, the refugees, the war dead, the fifty years (so far!) of statelessness—or perhaps (from the skewed Israeli point of view) Ibrahim was a minor, acceptable sacrifice for saving the Jews from another round of slaughter. But judging it from within the smaller, more precious frame of human reference, both boys should be standing here right now making faces at each other, the little one following the big one around and hanging on his legs.

“I am so sorry,” George said to Leila, and meant it, as much as he could. She looked at him gratefully.

History was a sad business.

D
ORON WOKE AT DAWN IN
the backseat of the jalopy. He picked his head up and peered out the window. A red bus bounced past. He was parked out in front of the Peugeot dealership, a block from the Talpiot circle. He felt his face; covered in stubble—no wonder he'd looked like a derelict to himself the night before. He squinted into the mirror and saw what looked like the face of a prisoner who had been held for a long time in the dark and now was brought up into the early morning sunshine. He squinted and blinked. It was a cool morning. His mouth tasted sour.

On his way to Kakal Street, a pair of headlights was trailing his car. He thought so, anyway. It was all Yizhar's fault. Doron mistrusted Yizhar, but at the same time, he believed Yizhar, believed in Yizhar, in the force of his personality, his unwavering sincerity, whether for good or for evil. If Yizhar said he had a security detail on Doron, then he did, that was Doron's thinking. What Yizhar said was always true, at least in its essence. The headlights disappeared. Yizhar knew everything, and was running the game from way up in his aerie at The Building.

A small security detail, Yizhar had said. At this hour, the streets were filling up with red public buses overflowing with soldiers going to and from base. Right now, Doron saw only one other passenger car, a bus or two behind him. He didn't like believing so strongly in someone of whom he was suspicious. But weren't those the same headlights behind him again, here on Kakal Street outside his mother's house? Probably not, probably not. Doron parked in his mother's shelter. The car's motor died with a shudder and a clunk. He thought he heard something sweep behind him as he walked up the short path to his mother's side door. Yizhar
had
put a tail on him.

Or maybe it was Hajimi.

Doron let himself in and flicked lights on in the hallway to the kitchen. His mother was asleep but would be up soon. Not for the first time, he thought it would be nice if he had some money and could get himself his own place. He stood in front of the refrigerator and examined its contents. It was spartan fare, a half dozen eggs and a half liter of low-fat milk and two containers of yogurt, some old hard Bulgarian cheese and a couple of rewrapped pita loaves—the refrigerator of an old person, he thought. He sectioned the one remaining lemon and ate it with some yogurt.

The yellowed photograph of his parents on the shores of the Kinneret was in its place next to the coffee machine on the sideboard, surrounded by bowls of fruit. His father was leaning on his crutch, as usual. He was the only man in the world who looked jaunty with a crutch. He was about Doron's age in the photo. Doron's mother had her eyes locked on her husband, and was holding on to his arm as her skirt blew around her. They were a honeymooning couple, about to make a baby. It was hard imagining them before his birth. To him it seemed as if they had met and fallen in love and gotten married and gone to the Kinneret all with the express purpose of creating him. But why? To set him down in this world to meet his fate? If they had only imagined.

He went into the bathroom to shave, and watched his real self reemerge. In his old room, Doron sat down heavily on the bed. This was now his mother's study. It was filled with her archaeology books, the endless
Encyclopedia Judaica,
books on the Philistines and the Persians, and odd collected artifacts from digs around the Middle East. Sitting on a shelf was
A Land Without People,
written by her mentor, the title a reference to the hopeful Zionist description of pre-Israel Palestine. He kicked off his dusty faux-leather loafers. A land without people, for a people without a land.

He unwrapped his long scarf. He laid it on the bed next to him alongside the wool hat he'd been wearing and looked at these, his accessories. They were utterly alien to him. The disguise was finished. From now on, he would go where he had to go in his own uniform. He hunted for it in the closet. Yes, he would greet misfortune as himself. His father's crutch and cane leaned up against the back wall. He noticed the honeymoon suit, his father's only suit, wrapped up in plastic, left hanging alongside his father's other clothes almost ten years after he'd died. This was the family museum. Doron's old stuff was here, too, miscellaneous athletic gear, his old scrapbook from his first days in the army, photos of the revered tanks of the past and pictures of the heroes—Dayan and Motta Gur, and Gertler, of course—stacked up on the closet floor. Doron shook his head at his former self as he riffled through the hangers to find his uniform. He put on each article of clothing carefully, and checked the embroidered insignias on his sleeves to make sure they were straight.