Martyrs’ Crossing (41 page)

•  •  •

“Y
OU'RE HERE?”
his mother asked. She stood in the kitchen doorway. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“You were asleep,” he said. He sat at the kitchen table, staring at the back of a cereal box. The sun was just coming up over the terrace wall. His mother walked past him quickly toward the coffee machine. He knew she didn't like to be seen by anyone, even him, this early in the morning. Her hair stuck out like a lion's ratty mane.

“You're in uniform,” she said.

He picked his beret up from the table and put it on.

“It looks good.” She went to the refrigerator and pulled a bag of coffee out of the freezer. “You look like your father.” She opened the coffee and began spooning it into the filter.

He got up and went over to her. “Good morning,” he said. He gave her a kiss.

“ . . . Three, four, five. There.” She was counting out spoons of coffee, but there were tears in her eyes. She looked away from him.

“You look as if you're about to become head of the Southern Command,” she said. She pulled the milk out of the refrigerator. “You going somewhere?”

“Oh, just a sort of a formal dress thing at headquarters,” he said. He watched the coffee begin to drip. “Some ceremony.”

She looked at him and didn't continue her questioning. The coffeepot hissed.

“Got any more lemons?” he asked. He smiled faintly.

“No, I don't,” she said, looking inside the refrigerator. “Someone finished them.” She cast him an accusing look.

She poured a cup of coffee for each of them and they carried their cups carefully down the long hall to the terrace. He remembered what his father had taught him: When you're carrying a full cup, don't look at it or it will spill. His father had learned that lesson serving breakfast in the officers' mess. It seemed to Doron like a maxim for leading a successful, unexamined life. And better yet, it was
true.
If you never looked down, the coffee never spilled. But it was hard to resist looking.

He and his mother sat down. It had been a long time since he had seen her with her hair unbrushed and with no makeup at all. Her grayness seemed eerier and more vulnerable when a spear of rising sunlight caught her full in the face. She saw him looking.

She patted his hand.

She wasn't dying, so why did he feel so sad.

“The thing's at headquarters in Tel Aviv?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She thought about that for a while.

She looked at the floor and picked absently at the skin around her thumbnail. She ran a fuzzy slipper over the curlicues and arabesques in the old Palestinian floor tiles, making new bright patterns in the dust. Beyond the terrace, palm fronds rustled in the wind like shuffled papers. “You have to face things, sweetheart.”

“I am facing them, Mother. Everything is fine.”

She watched an airplane descending over the desert. Doron watched her watching.

“I'm not getting that feeling.”

“Don't worry.” He tried to smile.

Her face knotted up.

The old sofa that long ago had been abandoned on the terrace to the Jerusalem weather creaked beneath his shifting weight. The noise was a noise he was used to; if it hadn't creaked, he would have noticed. The lingering night smell of newly blooming jasmine filled him with a sudden nostalgia for this house when they had just moved into it, this sofa when it was new, for his childhood, his mother when she was young. His father.

“Do you know the story of Gertler, mother?”

She looked at him.

“Gertler? A great, great hero. What do you mean, Ari? Everyone knows the story of Gertler.”

“I don't mean as prime minister, Mother.”

“Ah, you mean the scandal during the war. Not really, no,” she said. They both gazed at the floor as her toe slid along a maroon swirl. “I don't know it. I mean, not particularly, really.” She was trying to focus, arising from her bed only to deal with a disappearing son and the old story of Gertler. She picked up her coffee cup. “I mean, I don't know more than the average person, I suppose. We all respected him so much. Your father, too.” She sipped carefully.

“Yizhar was involved, I remember,” he said. “Isn't that right?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding as if she had just recalled it. “Yes, something like that I remember, too.”

A siren went off in the distance. They both picked up their heads to listen. It faded.

“They said that Gertler was ruined by drink,” she said. “And his friends were not as supportive as they might have been, your father told me. Professional jealousy, I think it was. Now that you mention it, I imagine Yizhar was one of them. Yes, he must have been. He and Gertler were great friends. He was Gertler's protégé.”

Doron nodded slowly.

“History is history, Ari,” she said. “Character is not immutable. Yizhar is a reputable man. Entirely reputable. I know what you are thinking.”

“Some people never change, Mother.”

“Maybe.” She leaned over and tapped his knee with a forefinger. “Yizhar is not a fool. Maybe he failed to stand by an old friend, back then, but he rescued Gertler, in the end. Yizhar was the one who spoke out for him. Trust him.”

He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.

“I have to go out,” she said. “Promise me you'll come back here after your whatever it is.”

“Of course I will,” he said.

She looked at him and he could see that she knew something was wrong.

“Don't do anything stupid, Ari. Remember your father.”

“I'm fine, Mother, stop worrying.”

“Remember what Daddy used to say: ‘When in doubt, wait.' ” She picked up their empty coffee cups.

“And ended up rushing into a bullet and a land mine, so much for waiting,” he said.

She was headed down the long corridor.

“Wait, let me remember,” she said, turning back to him from halfway down the hall. “What was it? Who said it? Let me think, let me think . . . Ben-Gurion? Maybe. Golda?” She stood there in the hallway's shadows, her voice coming out of the darkness. “Ah, I remember, it was Golda: ‘Heroes can't always afford to wait and see.' ”

“So there,” Doron said to her. “So the lesson is: ‘When in doubt, wait, but heroes can't always afford to wait.' ” He laughed. “There is a motto for everything
and
for its opposite, isn't there?”

She smiled at him.

“The gardener brought the pansies yesterday,” she said. “They look so bright from here. Do you like them?”

He didn't answer.

“Well, I'm getting dressed,” she said. “I'll be back in a minute.”

Doron stood and looked over the side of the terrace. Morning traffic had begun, but it was never very heavy in this neighborhood. A water truck drove by. A few cars were parked on the street, but he recognized all of them. They belonged to the neighbors. He saw the low branches moving on the tree across the street tree. A bird, landing? He heard his mother coming back down the hall.

“What are you looking at?” his mother asked from behind him. He turned around.

“Nothing,” he said. “There's nothing to see down there that I haven't seen a million times.”

She was wearing her pants suit, and carrying an open bag overflowing with a clipboard, pointer, slides for her presentation, and notes.

They walked into the kitchen together.

“I'll call a taxi,” she said. She went to the phone. He watched her. The curve of her back, which had thickened with age, seemed vulnerable. He definitely felt regret about what he was about to do, no matter how it turned out. But there was no choice. He was just waiting till the hour was appropriate.

“Promise me you're coming home later,” she said. She looked at him fiercely.

“I promise, I promise,” he said. He tried to make it sound light, as if he were imitating a young boy annoyed at his mother's attentions.

“Okay. Okay, then.” She looked away from him because she couldn't look at him. “I'm going to wait downstairs for the cab.”

“Maybe character
is
immutable, Mother,” Doron said. “
You've
never changed, for example.”

His mother turned back to him and smiled. “Be careful, Ari,” she said, squeezing his arm. She kissed him goodbye.

She left, and he went back to the terrace to watch for her taxi. She waited just below where he stood; he could see only her head and the tip of the pointer sticking out of the bag. The pots of pansies were still in their crates. A garbage truck was parked in the middle of the street, picking up everything on the block from there. The grocer's boy passed by with a cardboard box on his shoulder. Across the street, the low branches of the tree moved again.

A cat? Yizhar's “security detail”? Or what?—the wind?

He could see her taxi stuck behind the garbage truck. The cabby started to honk wildly, and Doron's mother, hearing the commotion, began walking down the street. She got into the cab and the garbage truck turned the corner, and he saw her hand waving out the taxi's back window to him.

A
T THE HOSPITAL ENTRANCE, PHILIP
turned to George. “Feeling up to it?” he asked. “You never feel up to it, Philip,” George said. “You just do it because you have to.” He nodded at a doctor who walked by and seemed to recognize him.

“I think cardiology is up there,” George said, pointing at a long stairway at the end of the hall. “Marina told me there is a terrible staircase the Israelis have put there as their own peculiar way of showing compassion for the sick and disabled.” Philip started toward it, but George held him back.

“Let me hold your arm, Philip.” He grasped Philip's arm with the strength of a vise.

“You know, I'm supposed to consider myself lucky if I'm well enough to climb these stairs and maybe go through another procedure. But it won't make me feel lucky. Remember the last time?” George stopped their progress for a moment. “I don't want to feel that way again.”

He breathed deeply. Three Palestinian women were sitting at the base of the stairwell, waiting. A sort of checkpoint, a security check with a metal detector, was set up at the bottom stair, manned by one soldier.

George wanted to run for the exit. The soldier was as good an excuse as any. But he knew he had to face the soldier, face the stairs, face Dr. Simcha Rodef, and submit. George looked at the metal detector.

“Lord,” he said to Philip, sighing.

“
This
will be fun,” Philip said.

“And just today, I'm feeling pretty well,” George went on, as if neither of them had noticed the coming obstacle. The soldier was looking at them, but of course, he would be looking at anyone who was approaching. George didn't even want to think about what the next few weeks would bring, if another procedure didn't simply finish him off right there on the table. Utter exhaustion, susceptibility to infection, disorientation, weakness, panic, and worst of all, the inability to move, and therefore the necessity of remaining in Jerusalem. He walked slowly along, looking down at the speckled stone floor. What if he were to die in Jerusalem?

George thought of Leila's son; and of Ari Doron. He looked at this soldier here before him: as usual, there was nothing to read in the face. They had illegible faces from a distance, and illegible faces from up close. A boyish face beneath a military beret. The soldier inspected him briefly.

“Yes?” the soldier said, in Hebrew.

“Cardiology,” Philip replied in English.

The soldier nodded.

“Yesh lecha nesheck?”
he asked.

“What is he saying?” George asked Philip.

Philip looked at the soldier and cocked his head.

The soldier patted his own pockets.

“Vepins. Do you have any vepins?” the soldier asked, this time in English.

“Hah!” George burst out. He could not restrain himself. Weapons. If only, he thought.

“No,” Philip answered.

“Go up, then,” the soldier said, gesturing toward the stairs.

•  •  •

D
R. RODEF'S OFFICE
was in a side hall on the cardiology floor. All hospitals are the same, George thought as he walked down the soundproofed linoleum and fluorescent corridor. Philip opened Rodef's office door. They walked in and George briefly gauged the quality of the reading material—old magazines from the Hebrew newspapers, scattered over a corner glass table—before lowering himself into a chrome and plastic chair. Philip spoke with a receptionist who sat behind a standard-issue Formica counter, and then he came to stand next to George, like a sentry.

“We're next,” he said. Dr. Rodef had tried to cheer things up with Gauguin prints, but the succulent foliage seemed stunningly out of place in the heart of the heart ward in the depths of Hadassah, up here on a forlorn hilltop overlooking the desert.