Martyrs’ Crossing (47 page)

R
EALLY THE VIEW WAS SPECTACULAR
from up here. Ahmed folded his arms over his chest and gazed down at the bucolic scene. Rana stood next to him. She was the distant cousin of a close family friend, so his boys who were at the base of the hill, controlling access from the Palestinian side, had agreed to allow her up even though they knew he was alone. Thank you, boys. Of course the Israelis wanted this hill—they would probably put a big Hilton and a pool at its summit and then say: Look down on our lands, Ye Mighty, and tremble! Those relentless Zionists! He put an arm around his pretty little princess. She ran a quick, small hand over his stubbled cheek. Oh, dear, he thought. Where
was
her ride back to Bethlehem? The ride was supposed to get here a full five minutes ago, and though Ahmed was a practiced master of small talk and small gestures, he was growing bored. Rana was too young to spend three hours with, love or no love. He wanted the sunset to himself. He looked down toward Jerusalem, controlled by Them. The city sparkled in the sun. Soon the glorious desert evening would come and turn everything orange and purple and blue.

And to my right: Bethlehem. Controlled by Us. It rose in steps on its own lesser hill. Ahmed was staking his claim, that's how he thought of it. Planting his flag on the patriarchal ground, squatting up here on Jabal Il-Aalam, the Hill of the World, in order to claim it for Palestine, or at least for the Authority. Or, at least, to throw a serious Palestinian wrench into the Israeli imperialist machinery, which wanted to build another of its enormous, ugly settlements on Jabal Il-Aalam.

Make the Israelis suffer for every one of their encroachments, was Ahmed's motto. He had actually pitched a tent here at the summit (Hillary on Everest, his self-mocking thought as he watched his men drive in the stakes). He'd prefer a Hilton for a long stay, too, but you had to use the means at your disposal, right? as he liked to tell George—and in any case, tent life was making him nostalgic, reminding him of his heyday in the prison camp in Lebanon. Rana walked away from him and looked down over Bethlehem. He loved her so much. As long as her ride arrived in the next five minutes, he loved her.

Outside his tent was a circle of about thirty plastic chairs for meetings of friends—Ahmed's supplicants, sycophants, acolytes, protégés, et al., or (skipping the niceties of the classic tongues) ass-kissers and toadies. He loved the sounds of the old Anglo-Saxon syllables. So accurate and physical and impolite and unlike Arabic in every way. Aha! Far in the distance, he heard the putt-putt-putt that was the unmistakable sound of a Palestinian taxicab. Soon Rana would be on her way. His meeting was scheduled for tomorrow—he was planning to discuss the future of Find the Soldier. The campaign had outlived its usefulness. Safeguarding the Hill of the World for Palestine, now that was important. He wondered if his discussion would be affected by the bombs.

Sunset on the Hill of the World, his view obstructed—enhanced, in fact, in his personal depraved Palestinian opinion—only by a fence of concertina wire the Israelis had put up to keep demonstrators and squatters away. He loved his lonely hours up here with the symbolic razor wire and the sunset. The black night was better than anything, with all the stars, and the prayers rising up from the nearby villages. Last night he lay down on the rocky earth and looked out at all the huge blackness for an hour or so. It gave him a whirling sense of time's speed and life's brevity. He saw the faraway lights of planes; were those satellites going so slowly, too high for aircraft, wheeling in their orbits? And shooting stars, lovely. He had nothing here but his mobile phone and the radio—and a lantern and a daily aluminum tin of food and a bag of coffee, and a charcoal grill for grilling the meats his people brought him in the afternoon and for boiling the water for his coffee, and a tin pot and matches and his journal and the newspapers and about a hundred little coffee cups—and a couple of books. And a generator. Oh, and a heater, for cold nights. And of course the army lamp that swung from the top of his tent. Israeli issue, he thought contentedly.

Rana came up to him and rubbed against him.

“Where's my taxi?” she said.

“It's coming, sweetheart. Listen.”

She perked up her head, and then nodded happily. The putt-putt-putt was coming up the dirt path the Israelis had carved into the side of Jabal Il-Aalam. It was nice to have Rana visit today, but that would be that. Ahmed wanted to protect whatever solitude he allowed himself, and besides, the rest of his days up here would be filled with business. The Hill of the World. Tomorrow was day three.
This
was a cause he could stick with.

He and Rana had heard the bomb earlier. Bang. Poof. Bang. It sounded like a major big motherfucker. Rana agreed. Lying side by side in his army cot, they had turned on his radio to hear the Israeli news. Mmmmmmh. Big, big, big. Oh my Christ, as George would say. Sixty or so killed on two buses, simultaneously. Hard to argue with that, eh? Damage done. And it had only been a week or so since the last round. Fools. Cowboys. Ahmed and Rana got out of bed and wrapped sheets around themselves and went to look down at Jerusalem. Little puff of black smoke down there at eleven o'clock, no? Rana agreed. Jaffa Road again.

Ahmed hated bombs. (Preferred assassinations, kidnappings, hostage takings: anything where some element of strategy and intelligence was involved.) No matter when a bomb went off, it ruined everything. You planned, you negotiated, you waited, you traded and bartered and connived and conceded, and you felt on the brink of something, you were just about to achieve something—it was touch and go, but possible. And then everything was brought down by some dumb fuck zipped into a vest full of TNT. Like an angry child kicking over a game he hadn't been invited to play. This bombing would ruin the launch of Hill of the World, no doubt. Ahmed had noticed recently that it was always an uncle or a cousin who'd recruited the suicide bombers. He noticed: they never sent their own sons.

The taxi.
Enfin.
Of course, this was the moment Rana would choose to push back her hair in that way. For a heartbeat, as her hair blew in the wind and fell back over her shoulder, Ahmed wished the bloody taxi away, and Rana back on the army cot.

•  •  •

G
EORGE PEERED OUT
the window as the taxi came to a stop. He had not planned on the girl. He hadn't planned on much at all, in fact. His heart was pounding away like A. Aronson's jackhammers, and a trickle of blood from Dr. Rodef's puncture had stained his white shirt. He noticed a large hematoma forming under the bandage; it was the first time the anticoagulant had shown signs of such overenthusiasm, he thought. His own blood made this doctor panicky. He put his coat back on, stepped out of the taxi onto the windblown hill, and told the driver to go. This was the end of things. Up here on this empty hill with the friend of his childhood. If he did it, he did it. If he didn't, he didn't. He felt dizzy. Light-headed from the thrumming inside him.

He was not in a calculating frame of mind, in fact. Unless one could call those fleeting memories that he was having on the ride up here calculations: After all our shared history, you let your cronies try to letter-bomb me, of all things. You exploited my dead grandson and my daughter. To say nothing of selling out the Palestinian people. You never really cared at all, did you?

Ahmed stood next to the girl. She looked like a child.

“To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?” Ahmed asked. He had to shout over the wind, because George had not come very close.

“Just a visit,” George said. He decided to ignore the girl's presence, and proceed.

“This is George Raad,” Ahmed said to the girl. “An old friend of mine.” The girl looked at George and smiled. She knew who he was.

“Come see my tent, George,” Ahmed shouted. His voice sounded cheerfully welcoming, but he looked concerned, and curious. He was barefoot. Just out of bed, George thought.

“Actually, I wanted to show
you
something,” George said. He reached into his coat pocket and was gratified to see Ahmed inch backward in anticipation of something bad. George looked up at him and smiled. “You look scared,” he said, moving in closer. “You know, that was a big bomb back there. Did you hear it?”

He took the gun out of his pocket. He held it hanging at his side. It suddenly looked very big to him.

Ahmed was looking at it, too.

“My God,” the girl said. George noticed that she separated herself from Ahmed, rather than move toward him for protection. Smart girl.

“What's that for?” Ahmed said.

George gave a short laugh.

“A better question is whose is it,” George said. “Don't you want to know how I got it?”

“I guess so,” Ahmed said quietly. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at George.

“It's Ari Doron's,” George said.

Ahmed looked at the gun, processing the name. George watched as he tried to remember. The wind rattled the concertina wire. The girl shivered and drew her little leather jacket tightly around her.

“The soldier,” Ahmed said, finally.

“Yes,” George said. “That's right. The most astonishing thing, really. He came to the hotel and handed me his gun. Loaded—he bothered to inform me.”

“Why don't you put it back in your pocket?” Ahmed said.

“What, and keep it . . . like a souvenir?” George asked.

“Sure,” Ahmed said, nodding. The girl was over at the edge of the hill now, far enough away but watching the two men. They could hear George's taxi going back down the hill.

“But the soldier said I should
use
it, Ahmed.” George looked at the gun hanging from his hand like an unpleasant artificial limb. “You know, I knew his name all along, Ahmed. My little secret, eh?”

Ahmed's face registered no emotion.

“Let's go sit down, George, and stop this nonsense,” he said. “We'll be out of the wind in the tent. Rana will make us coffee.”

George looked around. Beautiful spot. High and masterful, like Olympus.

“I have a question for you, Ahmed,” George said.

“What is your question, George?”

“It might seem impolite, you know. Propriety disregarded, and all that. Hope you won't mind?” George gestured with his palms in a questioning manner, but he had the gun in one hand, and Ahmed took another step backward.

“Get on with it, George.”

“Why did you let them try to kill me?” He looked at Ahmed. He raised his eyebrows.

“What?” Ahmed said, pulling his head back and frowning. “Who?”

“Damascus,” George said.

Ahmed shrugged.

“I didn't
let
them, George, don't be a fool,” he said. “Nothing was going to stop them, except their own stupidity and incompetence. Which did stop them, actually.”

Ah, Ahmed, never at a loss.

“A friend of my son-in-law's says you could have stopped them, but that offending them just then would have been inconvenient for you,” George said. “Now, what do you say to that? That sounds just like you, doesn't it? Has the ring of truth. . . .”

“I did what I could, George,” Ahmed said. “They certainly didn't kill you, did they? I mean, here you are, now, playing
your
little game.”

“It's not a game, Ahmed.” George brandished the weapon in a swinging way. It waved in the air very unimpressively, he thought.

“Oh, put down that stupid thing, will you, please?” Ahmed said.

George nodded. Ahmed's face, something about his expression, looked peculiarly diabolical to George. George smiled.

“You're
enjoying
this,” Ahmed said.

“What do you expect?”

Ahmed turned his back. His loose white shirt was whipped through with wind. At least this was a more fitting assassin than Sheukhi, Ahmed thought. And this one would never shoot a man in the back. Would he?

No, this one would simply never shoot a man at all.

“Don't you turn your back on me, Amr.” George lifted the gun and pointed it at the small of Ahmed's back. Was that a good spot to aim for? His doctor's instinct told him yes. Go for the spine.

George heard the girl gasp. He must have looked as if he intended to shoot. There,
that
was something to be proud of. Ahmed turned around. He looked at George and then started slowly toward him.

George moved back a step. He wanted to keep his distance from Ahmed, who could overpower him so easily.

“I'm bleeding, did you see?” George said. He shrugged off his coat, switching the gun from hand to hand, and moving backward. He let the coat fall in a heap to the ground. He stuck out his bandaged arm and looked at the mess. It really was quite bloody, his sleeve.

Ahmed glanced at George's arm.

“That looks bad,” he said. He kept approaching, as if to look more closely at the wound.

“Don't come any farther, please,” George said. He moved the gun up slightly, aiming at the heart. At least he knew for sure the damage
that
would do.

Ahmed stopped.

Jesus, thought George, shivering. God, it was cold up here.

“What's wrong with you, George?” Ahmed asked.

“I don't know,” George said. “My heart is giving out, I think.” He blinked back tears from the stinging wind. His heart was doing strange things. He dropped the arm that held the gun, and he felt the gun hanging there against his leg. For a second he thought, I must look ridiculous; but then the thought was gone.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Ahmed asked.

“They took my blood,” George said.

“Ah.”

“I'm feeling a little queasy.”

“You don't look well at all,” Ahmed said.

George nodded.