Martyrs’ Crossing (7 page)

Doron did not know what to do with himself. He fidgeted, smoked a cigarette. He hoped he could not be seen over here, kicking at a stone, stepping over sage and sorrel plants, half hidden behind a big gray mausoleum and a dusty, swaying willow. He did not think any Israeli would survive being discovered in this place right now. He could just make out the individual mourners—the boy's grandfather was there, he saw, a dark young man at his side. Doron watched the procession coming down that hill toward him. He remembered the back of the mother's bent head as she sobbed over her boy. Her whole life came to an end right there in front of him, and he could do nothing for her. “Please help me,” she'd said toward the very end. He'd had an impulse to console her, to offer kind platitudes, the way he was used to doing with the bereaved. Instead, he had to stand there like a soldier, and take it. When he finally touched her arm, after, she recoiled. He remembered that. Well, she was right.

Tomorrow he was to appear before a military investigator. Headquarters would stand by him, of course. He would tell them about the man he finally reached somewhere, working late in some office in the high tower of the Defense Department in Tel Aviv, who had ordered him not to allow the Hajimi family to cross. Maybe he could even show them the secure number. He might have it somewhere, stuffed into a pocket.

His mother had tried to console him, as if that were possible. He could hear the worry in her voice over the phone.

“Look,” she'd said to him. “The army will stand by you if you stand by them. They believe that protecting your name is the same as protecting theirs.”

“Yeah.”

“You did your best,” she said. “Poor little child.”

How had the boy ended up dead? Doron didn't understand it. Someone on the phone in a distant city by the sea had told him not to let them in, but he didn't even get the man's name. And in any case, you didn't always have to follow orders. Well, he hadn't really. The ambulance had come, he had contacted headquarters, they had refused her request, he had been about to let them in anyway, over Zvili's indignant protest, and it was fate alone that had brought help there only after the boy was beyond saving. He told himself all this. But he knew he should have let them through the minute they appeared at the trailer door.

He still wasn't hungry. He had barely eaten since he left the checkpoint. When he focused on the graveyard crowd again, he thought he might be hallucinating, there were so many people flowing down to the graveyard, covering the hillside, too many for a funeral by far. Too many. With flags and banners. Flags and banners, so unkind, so festive and inappropriate. But of course, this was not just any funeral. This was his own funeral, Doron kept thinking. Up front, where a white-turbaned sheikh was standing, Doron could see Raad, in black, slender, erect.

The Raad family. An old Palestinian family, he had read. They looked as if they were people just like his own family. But they weren't. They were Palestinians. And now they were going to be victims: a family with a martyr. Their little boy was dead. The banners were waving for Ibrahim. Now Doron knew the child's name. Another banner slowly unfurled at the top of the hill.
IN ISRAEL,
it read in English,
SOLDIERS KILL BABIES.
Doron leaned against the willow. He could hear the crowd roaring and chanting. The banners flickered and waved in the wind. They snapped and flickered, and his head hurt. He needed to eat.

He was afraid to see the bier go down. He crushed out his cigarette and wandered up the hill, making sure to keep some distance from the watchful cameramen and the crowd. Not that anyone would recognize him. When he reached the crest, Doron looked down over the heads of the crowd and the backs of the banners to the valley where a little bunch of people was locked in a knot around the burial mound. Doron wished that women were allowed to attend. He remembered the exact tilt of Marina Raad's head as she sat desperately filling out her forms, the exact color of her dark eyes, the exact anger in her penetrating, dismissive regard. Then again, he was grateful that women were forbidden. He didn't think he could bear to see her. And what if she saw him?

•  •  •

G
EORGE LISTENED TO
the old man talking. Normally, George loved funerals. Who wouldn't? The sheer joy at not being dead, the delight in the presence of dozens of other living beings, the uplifting thought that you get to carry on eating and fucking and breathing and shitting, while some other poor mortal is going down to nothingness. But the funeral of a child was different and the funeral of this child was not something he was prepared for.

He looked at the sheikh. He was nervous about the old man standing there in his turban; he mistrusted anything left to the discretion of clergymen. George dreaded the eulogy, which was not traditional at Muslim funerals, and was bound to be political (what else could you say about a baby's short life?), but Marina had accepted it when it was suggested by friends of Hassan's. The sheikh's white-wrapped fez—a sign that he had made the haj to Mecca—reflected the strong sun. He gave a dry cough of self-importance, and began to speak.

“We are all here today because, again, a Palestinian has died at the hands of the Israelis,” he said in a low voice. He paused dramatically.

No, no, no. George wanted to correct him. I beg to differ. That isn't why I came here today, haji. I came because my little boy is dead.

“A Palestinian, a fine baby boy. A boy who flourished in his parents' love, but who was never to learn about his people and his stolen homeland, never to become another brave warrior in the battle for Palestinian liberation.” The sheikh shook his head somberly and looked down at his notes. Notes? What could notes for such palpable drivel say? Pal boy innocent . . . /Zionist enemy to blame . . . /Pal people must advance to final goal . . . /Push Zionist enemy into sea . . . /Burn ground beneath feet of Zionist occupation force???

“When we consider this young boy's mother,” the sheikh went on, squinting up at the crowd, “we cannot help but feel a burst of pride, pride in her composure, her courage, her stubborn will, her clear desire to continue the battle no matter the cost.” George felt Philip tremble next to him. The Palestinian people, thought George. He sensed their impending introduction into the funeral oration. He could always predict the moment when The Palestinian People would enter the speeches of Palestinians. Almost invariably, he was correct. By now it had become a joke between him and Philip.

At the back of the crowd, listening to the doddering ancient prattle away, the young men who were supposed to be today's brave warriors cheered wildly and leaped up and down and made the bright banners they were holding wiggle like eels flashing and glinting in the sun. This is the Palestinian people, George reflected as he heard the cheering get louder, then fade, then start up again. What are they cheering about?

“She is a shining example to the Palestinian people,” the sheikh continued. Although vindicated, George found himself overtaken by a wave of helpless anger. He tried to imagine Marina as a kind of heroic female standard-bearer for the future Palestinian liberation, but all he could see was the lonely creature he had left at the door to the kitchen in the house in Ramallah, in her stark veil, surrounded by the silent sisters-in-law. My daughter, who used to wear ribbons in her hair and play Chinese jump rope on an American playground. After all, she had only been trying to get her boy to the doctor. If Ibrahim had made it across alive, Marina would have been just another desperate Palestinian mother accommodating herself to humiliating Israeli demands. It was only her dead child in that awful shroud that gave her this sudden political stature. George wanted to spit the empty words back into the sheikh's face. But the poor stupid old geezbag was only doing his job, and life also was stupid.

George succumbed to a flash of unsummoned memory: Ibrahim leaping off the foldout bed at Marina's, wearing his floppy red slippers and waving a golden plastic sword. Ibrahim with a sword—it played on George's love of Palestinian history; at school in Jerusalem, every boy in his class wanted more than anything to ride in the saber-wielding cavalry of a nineteenth-century Middle Eastern army. And Ibrahim that day was like a cavalryman. He hurled himself into the air with no thought to his own safety and utter trust that he would land on his feet. George remembered. The gold blade flashed.

George wanted to go back in time. What if he'd been there at the checkpoint, been in charge of his family, hadn't left Ramallah to return to comfortable Cambridge? He could have fixed things, saved the boy, stepped in. George wanted a time machine, only for this one thing. Time machine: he hadn't even thought of those two words since his school days. But now he did. Open the door. Fasten the seat belt. Press the button, pull the lever. Zap, and there you were, in the past. Not to right the wrongs done his people nor to rewrite history, nor to do any of the historic deeds he'd planned and failed to accomplish, but just to do that one simple small thing. In memory the boy kept falling and falling through the bright air, sword flashing, down toward the bottom of the world, where his grandfather scooped him up before he hurt himself, and kissed him.

George felt as if he might black out. He wondered if his childhood asthma was returning. Shortness of breath often precedes a heart attack, he well knew. But perhaps it was sympathetic asthma, adult onset. Just behind the sheikh's left shoulder, he saw Ahmed Amr whispering to a flunky who had a cell phone at his other ear. George did not want to fall apart here, in front of everyone.

He looked down into the hole next to the bier. Why did the time after death seem so different from the time before birth? You've already managed not to exist quite nicely during the one, he thought. You'll probably get through the other. You couldn't say that one black period was longer than the other, or qualitatively better or worse. But having been alive, you felt somehow a morbid nostalgia for living when it came to flinging the mind forward into the grave. History—dinosaurs, wars, harvest festivals, trilobites, druids, plagues, diplomacy, droughts, music, and the like, worms, snails, and starfish—came before birth, full of facts and events. Eternity, empty and blank and possibly unpleasant, came after.

As a doctor, George had come to the ugly conclusion that fate existed, biologically, even though he'd rejected the concept long ago as philosophically repugnant. How many hearts had he watched detonate, just as the hearts of the preceding generation had and the generation before that one, so many in one family dying early of a final, dramatic coronary seizure. What was in your genes had been in the genes of your ancestors millennia ago: prehistoric hairy peoples who wandered the steppes or the plains or the jungles, who carried sharp weapons and wore negligible clothing and did not read books. Maybe in George's own asthmatic chromosomes, it was written that his grandson would die of asthma, and given the family's geographic origins, it could be predicted that the boy would die of that asthma in Palestine, and given history, why should it not happen during a closure, at a checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank?

History and genetics were not so far removed from each other, just like geology and biology. The primordial ooze was still pretty much the primordial ooze, pushed and shoved into different packages down through the eons. All life was like a cartoon monster arising from the squelching swamp, feet trailing mud. Why, for example, should human life require zinc or potassium or iron or salt? But it did. The holy texts said we were made of dirt, and on that point at least they were not wrong. Ooze, all of us. He remembered sitting quietly with Ibrahim on his lap while Marina snapped their picture. The boy laughed for each photo, but only after the flash went off and the picture had been taken. And so the smile was lost.

George looked up again and saw Amr's beard behind the sheikh. He looked away, but in that brief glance, he had already seen too much. Most of The Cause's brave warriors were dead, but the ones who remained—could you really be brave, if after the long years of struggle, you were still among the living?—were all standing here in the cemetery, listening to the sheikh's foolishness, all except the Chairman, who couldn't get there. Detained in Gaza, as usual. Across that hole that seemed to reach down forever at George's feet, he'd seen them. Across the hole, suits, ties, moustaches, grave faces. He raised his eyes again. Behind the sheikh, George saw Ahmed, half hidden but vigilant. George nodded his head unconsciously, and shifted his gaze to another man. But Ahmed, who had always been the braver of the two, did not falter. His sharp eyes sought out George's.

George did not want Ahmed's pity. It would be unendurable, after their disagreements, and the endless wondering about Najjar's shooting, about the threat against himself. How much, really, had Ahmed known? Stay away, stay away, George thought. At the same time, he felt a hateful urge to throw himself at Ahmed's feet and beg for his affection.

George looked around at the remnants of the long battle. Salah was here, alongside Ahmed and Bassim and Hayder. Khalil and Hussein and Kamal and Wa'il would have been here, too, if they had survived—there were always ghosts at any Palestinian reunion. The younger men, assistants and aides-de-camp and sycophants and power seekers, stood farther back, each group behind its particular protector. Ahmed had his coterie: all the boys who had been in his youth battalion and were now grown; a selection of valiant counselors who taught rifle assembly and kidnapping at the summer camps he ran, and all the other dazzling militants he had collected since then. These were the ones who thought of George as a man who had turned and run from the fight. So unfair—George Raad, who should have been their great hero, who was more brilliant than all of them put together, who, back when he was a young man, had even fancied himself a future elder, being worshipped and followed and listened to by just such fellows. Because of his great wisdom, of course. Back when he was a young man and in exile with Ahmed in Amman and Beirut. Back when he had participated in his one small raid. Before he left the guerrilla life and went on to America, while the rest of them remained.