Martyrs’ Crossing (6 page)

They are not permitted to enter Israel, the voice on the other end said.

But her papers seem in order.

Not permitted, Lieutenant.

But she goes back and forth all the time.

Not during closure, the voice said. Not during
this
closure.

But an ambulance is already on its way.

Not permitted.

The ambulance is here. Doron slammed down the phone. Lights were flashing through the slits in the guardroom. He heard a siren wailing. He stuffed the empty cigarette pack into his jacket pocket and stood.

“I am so sorry,” he said to the woman. “They just won't permit it. I don't know what to say. Sorry.”

She didn't even look at him.

“Where's my injured man?” Doron asked. The men pointed. The private was standing quietly in a different corner. His wound was still bleeding—they'd hit a part of the face that bleeds profusely even when the injury is not serious.

“Your ambulance is here, go on.” The private started moving out delicately, as if he thought any motion would increase the bleeding.

Doron heard a low voice.

“And what ambulance are we going to take?” It was the first time she looked directly into his eyes.

He looked back at her. What was he going to do with her?

The child looked up at him from her lap with panicky eyes.

Oh, God.

He watched her fumble with the inhaler again. It never seemed to work.

“Lieutenant,” she said.

The child was turning blue.

“Okay. Okay. I'm letting you through,” he said to the woman. “Come on, get up.” He gathered up her jacket and documents and the inhaler. She picked up the boy, who hung limp in her arms. Doron looked at him and felt the panic gather in his stomach like a hard ball.

Zvili blocked their way.

“Move, Sergeant,” Doron said.

“No,” said Zvili.

“No?” Doron said. “No?”

“The woman is the wife of a terrorist,” Zvili said.

“Move, Zvili,” Doron said.

“No,” Zvili said, planting his feet at both sides of the doorjamb. “She could be a part of some plan. What do we know? Headquarters said she can't come in; I heard you talking to them. You can't let her in.”

“You better get out of his way, Zvil!” another soldier shouted from behind them.

“Have you looked at the boy, Zvili?” Doron asked the question in a very even tone with spaces between the words. Marina stood very close to Doron. He looked down at Ibrahim. Was he breathing at all? Still, behind Doron's ball of panic over the boy, he worried, he worried—was he doing the right thing? Was Zvili right?

“Hurry, hurry,” she said.

She turned to Doron.

“Look at my boy,” she whispered to him.

He looked again.

“Okay, that's it,” Doron said, and Zvili moved aside.

They all rushed through the door together, as the emergency medical crew of the ambulance rushed toward them. The doors to the back of the ambulance had just opened. A man in a white coat ran to the injured private, who was just ahead of Marina and Doron and holding the red rag against his cheek.

“No,” shouted Doron at them. “Here, here.” He pointed, and the white-coated man saw the boy. Doron saw a look of concern pass over the man's face.

The man felt the boy's pulse and he put his hand above Ibrahim's mouth. He bent down and put his ear against the child's chest.

He stood and started shouting and everything began to jump around Doron and Marina. Now everyone was acknowledging an emergency. The white-coated man plucked the child out of his mother's arms and rushed him into the back of the ambulance. Marina ran after them and Doron followed her. The bleeding private stood off to the side, watching, dabbing at his eye. Everyone inside the ambulance was shouting, green monitors beeped, a nurse leaned over. The child lay pale against the white stretcher, a mask over his face, a white hospital blanket thrown across him, emblazoned with big black Hebrew letters. Marina kept trying to push through the technicians to get to him. Finally they let her hold his hand.

The siren was still going. Doron stood outside thinking, I am the enemy, I am the enemy. The ambulance's spinning light made the rubble at his feet appear and disappear. The little bits of glass and pebble seemed to dance around him in a circle, flickering. He saw Zvili walking back to the trailer. The private's damaged face flashed in and out of view. In the artificial light, the slender-legged watchtower with its searchlight at the top looked pitifully fragile. It looked as if a child could blow it out like a candle.

The next thing Doron knew, the man in white was walking stoop-shouldered over to the bleeding private. Doron turned and looked toward the ambulance. It was as if everything had come to a halt. A nurse sniffled loudly. There was an odd silence except for the mother sobbing against the side of the ambulance. Everyone was watching her, unmoving. They looked frightened. Doron walked toward her. He hesitated. She was shaking with sobs. He put his hand on her arm. She let it stay there for a moment. She turned and looked at him. He knew right then that he would give anything to forget that look. Then she shook him off with a violent movement of her arm, and climbed into the ambulance to be with her boy.

T
HE WINTER WIND BLEW THROUGH
the cypress stands at the edge of the graveyard. The first line of mourners approached the family plot, followed by a small bier borne by two men over the stone-strewn yard. Behind George and Philip, hundreds more filed into the small cemetery. Marina had been left at home with her sisters-in-law. Women did not attend Muslim funerals, Philip had reminded George. The mourners wore sunglasses and shaded their eyes.

“Get out of my way,” George heard someone yell. Philip wheeled around to see who was disturbing the quiet. It was the press corps. The television people were up ahead, behind a police fence. The still-rising sun cast long bony shadows over the headstones and mausoleums.

The photographers and cameramen, shoving for position, clambered up the graveyard wall, and tumbled down. Some had hauled themselves and their equipment up into the cedar branches. Others stood on aluminum ladders they had brought along. As the wind shifted, they appeared and disappeared among the branches. Down the hill and blanketing the small street that connected the graveyard to East Jerusalem, George could see the procession coming, hats, scarves, and keffiyehs, and bareheaded young men by the hundreds, and above it all the green banners of Hamas, and then, farther back, the red, white, green, and black of the Palestinian flag. George wondered what all the young men in the crowd would do if they could get their hands on an Israeli soldier—any Israeli soldier—now, right now. Oh, Ibrahim. The cameras were pointed at the mourners like the open mouths of fish.

George was exhausted today beyond imagining. Jet lag in one direction, jet lag back. For no one but Marina would George have roused himself once more in his condition, much less flown halfway round the world and walked for a mile in front of cameras to a place where he would have to stand for at least an hour in a cold, unpitying wind.

The first callers had merely stunned him, and left him cold with incredulity, suspecting some kind of a hoax. But Marina, calling from Ramallah, had convinced him, and sent George into a torrent of action. He knew it was Marina because when he picked up the receiver, no one spoke. He kept saying, “Darling, darling,” and on the other end there was nothing but the oceanic emptiness of an international connection.

This
never
happened to him, this inability, this fear of confronting whatever was coming to meet him. What could he say that would help her? Nothing, nothing. It was beyond his control. She was two oceans away, Christ, thousands of miles, a world away, no comfort could reach her. I'm coming, he said to her. Finally, he heard her click off. Blood seemed to drain away from him. He felt himself fading and grabbed onto the edge of his desk for support. He dumped himself into his desk chair.

“Philip,” he'd called. His voice sounded faint, even to him. But Philip came in.

He must have been waiting just outside the door, expecting to be summoned. Obviously, he already knew everything. He came too close. George waved him back a little. George saw tears in his eyes.

“No, no, no,” George said to him, sinking farther back in his chair and covering his own eyes with his forearm. “Philip. That's too much sympathy. I can't stand it, really.”

“I'm sorry, Doctor,” Philip said, standing there with his hands oddly clasped together.

“Just don't touch me, if you were thinking of it,” George said.

“No,” Philip said. “No, I won't.”

And now here Philip was, in a graveyard in East Jerusalem, bothering to be furious at some noisy cameraman. Dear boy. What a good idea to bring him. Philip was having all George's emotions for him. Philip was in charge of emotions and political thought: outrage at the Israelis, lucid understanding of the Palestinian politicians who were making hay out of the tragedy, canny but diplomatic. Very useful. George might as well be dead already. As he watched them pray over the small, shrouded body, he wished he were.

Reading
Al-Quds
over the breakfast he could not bring himself to taste that morning, George had felt tears sting his eyes for the first time. That was typical of him, to feel something only when it was in writing, only at that safe, mediated distance, when it was more like art or spectacle than like something that was really happening, and to him. He had emotions the way a pornography enthusiast had sex. There was something about the use of the word
gasp
that did it. The editors of
Al-Quds
wrote that Ibrahim had been detained at the checkpoint because he was Hassan Hajimi's child. Hajimi, they reminded their readers, was a disaffected young follower of the Chairman who had turned to Hamas in the past two years.

They wrote that the boy had been visibly gasping—that word—for two hours while his mother, incidentally the daughter of George Raad, the physician and writer (“incidentally”—George noticed that), waited for the officers at the checkpoint to examine and approve the boy's medical documents. That a new, superstrong U.S.-issued tear gas had been used, for the first time, on the crowd at the checkpoint, and had gravely exacerbated the child's respiratory distress. The editors noted that Ibrahim Hajimi was Hassan Hajimi's only child and George Raad's only grandchild. Hajimi, they went on, had been in and out of Israeli prisons since he was first arrested in a general sweep in Jenin in 1992. They added that Raad had recently been ill. Somehow, they managed to imply that all of this—the desperation of the Palestinian people, the prisons, the lack of offspring in Marina's family, the gasping, George's own condition—was the fault of the officers at the checkpoint. Philip was drinking coffee and reading over George's shoulder. George looked up at him, and Philip shook his head, pointing down to several errors in the Arabic typography, and an incorrect identification of George's great-grandfather, the family patriarch, in an old photograph. Ignoring painful content. Attaboy, Philip—trained at the foot of the master.

He was glad Philip was with him, because it was so hard right now to be with Marina. George could barely bring himself to talk to her or to touch her, she seemed so alien and past helping. Her sorrow was transforming her. She had welcomed him the morning he arrived by walking into his arms and sobbing there for a long minute, as he could recall her having done when she was little. He held her and remembered all the stooping and hugging he'd done then, the enclosing arms and bent head and pathetic useless doglike murmurs that were meant to console his child for the broken dolls and spilled glitter and fights with friends and ruined dresses. He cherished those few moments after he arrived back in Ramallah, moments during which he felt himself give way the smallest bit, felt himself feel something along with her, felt the loss of her little boy who had been so delightful and full of interest and amusement. His grandson. He knew it would catch up with him later, when he wasn't trying, wasn't ready for it.

After that initial outburst, Marina retreated. She seemed distant, even when she was not sitting curled up in a corner with her head buried in her hands and her hands buried in her hair. George busied himself with plans for her trip down to see Hassan at al-Moscobiyyeh, the lockup in downtown Jerusalem, when he realized that she didn't need documents, special plates, VIP papers, or an okay from the Chairman now. She could just take a taxi to the checkpoint, walk across, and take another taxi into town. No one at the checkpoint minded now who her husband was, not after what had happened. The closure was still on, but the Israelis would not stop her again.

•  •  •

I
N THE CORNER
of the cemetery, a shadow flickered between two of the grand old Arab cenotaphs. Doron was trying to hide himself, here in alien territory. Just a few days ago, he had been a good soldier, in a smart uniform. Today, he was the unnamed baby-killer, dressed in civilian clothes. He huddled in a corner and tightened his blue-jean jacket. This was the kind of place he had never been to, a place where he would never go: in Arab Jerusalem, among the enemy. But Doron couldn't help himself, he had to be there, it was an obligation. He still couldn't believe what had happened; he had never seen a dead child before, not in all his days on the checkpoints, not in Lebanon, even.